{"id":1534678,"url":"https://alion.io/job/1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping","title":"Frontend Engineer, AI Prototyping","company":{"id":669420,"name":"1-800 Contacts","domain":"1800contacts.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/1800contacts","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"Frontend","role_family":"Frontend","seniority":null,"employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Draper, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":67000,"max_usd":154000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":712},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"React Native","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-30T16:38:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T06:12:42Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":26,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":26},"description":"Who we are\nSeekWell is the parent company of 1-800 Contacts, Luna, and The Framery. Our goal is to make it simpler, easier, and more accessible for people to get the vision care they need. We maintain the legendary, award-winning culture 1-800 Contacts started almost 30 years ago and continue to develop innovative, pioneering products and businesses that make consumers cheer. We’re owned by KKR - one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity investment companies. We’ve built an excellent company and changed an industry by putting the customer first, always. The best is yet to come!\nWhy you want this job\nWe're building toward a future where every customer interaction with vision care is seamless, informed, and genuinely personal. Our design and product teams are already exploring the systems and experiences that can make that possible, and AI is core to how we're getting there.\nThe CX Incubator exists to rapidly build and test new concepts for our mobile app before larger investments are made. We're looking for a hands-on Full Stack Engineer focused on AI prototyping who combines strong software engineering, deep frontend experience, strong applied AI experience, and product and design instincts to turn ambitious customer experience ideas into functional, testable prototypes.\nYou'll work alongside a marketer and designer to take concepts from ideation to realistic, testable simulations and prototypes. You'll also help build and evolve our React/Next.js prototyping platform, which enables non-technical partners to rapidly create and experiment with app experiences.\nA key part of this role is determining how AI should be applied to a customer problem-not simply integrating a predefined solution. You'll evaluate different AI models, services, and technical approaches and determine how to apply them to experiences involving conversational AI, content decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative experiences, voice interactions, and other emerging capabilities.\nYou'll use AI-native development tools and workflows to move quickly from idea to working simulations and prototypes. This role isn't simply about using AI to code faster; it's about understanding, evaluating, and applying AI technologies, making sound technical decisions, and independently figuring out how to turn loosely defined concepts into working POCs.\nThe goal is to prove out both the customer experience and the technology behind it-not to build the final production-ready solution.\nThis is a role for an experienced builder who is comfortable with ambiguity, can independently determine technical approaches, enjoys creating working solutions quickly, and learns through experimentation.\nWhat you’ll do\nTurn ideas, customer problems, and hypotheses into functional, testable prototypes across web and mobile experiences.\nHelp build and evolve our React/Next.js prototyping platform, including reusable components and integrations that enable rapid experimentation.\nEvaluate different AI models, services, and technical approaches to determine which are best suited to specific customer problems and experiences.\nBuild AI-powered experiences using LLMs, existing AI models and services, APIs, customer and product data, and modern web and mobile technologies.\nPrototype customer experiences involving content and intelligent decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative content, conversational AI, voice, retrieval/grounding, agents, and other emerging AI capabilities.\nIndependently determine the technical approach needed to take loosely defined AI-powered concepts from idea to a functional, testable POC.\nRapidly test different technical approaches and evaluate tradeoffs including experience quality, reliability, latency, complexity, and cost.\nRecognize when AI is-and isn't-the right solution and combine AI capabilities with traditional software approaches when appropriate.\nCreate realistic customer simulations that can be tested with internal and external audiences.\nExplore how to ground, guide, and evaluate AI experiences using customer profile data, customer context, and human-defined guardrails.\nConnect prototypes to content libraries, AI SDKs, APIs, data sources, and staging systems.\nExplore AI-forward design systems and guardrails that help generated experiences and agents stay within defined UX, brand, content, and interaction guidelines.\nUse AI-native development workflows with tools like Cursor, Claude, Copilot, and similar technologies.\nHelp define practical guardrails for safe, reliable, and brand-appropriate customer-facing AI experiences.\nUse feedback from customer and user testing to rapidly iterate on prototypes and explore different approaches.\nWhat you'll need\nStrong full-stack software engineering experience with deep frontend expertise using React, Next.js, TypeScript, or similar technologies, along with hands-on experience building backend services, APIs, and integrations.\nStrong hands-on experience evaluating, selecting, integrating, and applying existing AI models, services, or approaches within applications, prototypes, or customer-facing experiences.\nExperience working with applied AI capabilities such as LLMs, conversational AI, recommendation or decisioning systems, personalization, retrieval/grounding, agents/tool calling, or generative AI.\nDemonstrated ability to evaluate different AI approaches for a use case, understand their tradeoffs, and independently determine an appropriate technical approach.\nDemonstrated ability to take an ambiguous AI-powered concept from idea to a functional POC or prototype without requiring a predefined technical solution.\nExperience integrating APIs, cloud services, data sources, and external systems.\nFamiliarity with evaluating AI experiences for factors such as quality, reliability, latency, cost, and customer experience.\nFamiliarity with AI-native development tools such as Cursor, Claude, Copilot, or similar technologies.\nStrong product and design instincts and an appreciation for great customer experiences.\nComfort with ambiguity, rapid experimentation, and building enough to test and learn without over-engineering.\nExperience incorporating user or customer feedback into prototypes and iterating based on what you learn.\nExamples of AI-powered applications, prototypes, or customer experiences you've personally built and the technical decisions you made while building them.\nExperience with React Native, native iOS development, or other mobile application development is a plus.\nPerks\nFree eye exams for your entire family\nDeep discounts on lenses, glasses, and other services\nAmazing healthcare coverage\n401(k) match\nFlexible PTO\nTuition reimbursement program\nIn-house restaurant with highly discounted meals (Steak dinner under $6)\nFree snacks, ice cream, and drinks every day\nFull onsite gym\nWe are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7405,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Optometry & Optical Stores"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-30T18:13:16Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.313,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":26,"expected_fill_days":9,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-27T09:18:02Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":10341,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-28T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":669420},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=669420"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2F1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2F1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2F1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2F1800contacts-frontend-engineer-ai-prototyping"}]}