North Bay, ON (Remote-friendly)

Norlease is building the first verified rental listing platform for North Bay and Northern Ontario. Right now, renting in this market means scrolling through Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, both flooded with scam listings, fake landlords, and zero accountability. We fixed that: every landlord on Norlease goes through phone OTP verification and manual ID review before they can post a single listing. No income filtering, no credit checks, free for everyone. Just real listings from real people.

The platform is live in production right now, not a pitch deck or a Figma file. We're pushing hard toward a September launch across Northern Ontario, and we need someone who cares about how a product actually feels to use, not just whether it technically works.

What you'd actually be working on

The backend is solid: listing creation, search with map integration, photo upload pipelines, and a full admin review system are all built and shipping real changes to real users. What we need now is someone focused entirely on the experience layer. That means:

• Refining how the interactive map and search results work together, so finding a place feels fast and intuitive, not clunky
• Polishing the mobile listing flow, including camera capture for photos, which has already surfaced its share of real-device quirks (different browsers handle camera vs. gallery access very differently, and we've learned that the hard way)
• Building out listing cards, search filters, and browsing states that make Norlease feel like a real product, not a generic template
• Working closely on responsive design across a genuinely mobile-heavy user base, since most renters browsing listings are doing it from their phones, not a desktop
• Bringing a real design sensibility to auth-gated states, verification flows, and empty/loading states that a lot of teams treat as an afterthought

This isn't a "match this Figma exactly" role. You'll have real input into layout, interaction design, and the small details that make people trust a platform instead of bouncing off it.

Our stack

• Next.js 15 (App Router), TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• MapLibre GL JS + Protomaps for interactive maps
• Multi-photo upload with drag reorder, drag-to-crop, and native camera capture
• Clerk for auth-aware UI states and role-based views
• A real production Postgres-backed API, not mocked data

What we're looking for

• 2-3 years of professional frontend experience, ideally with a modern React/Next.js and TypeScript codebase
• A genuine eye for design craft: spacing, typography, hierarchy, motion, the details that separate "it works" from "it feels good to use"
• Comfortable owning mobile-first, responsive work end to end, since a huge share of our traffic is phone-first
• Experience debugging messy real-world browser behavior (camera APIs, file uploads, cross-device rendering inconsistencies)
• Someone who reads and respects existing code and design patterns before introducing new ones, this is a live production system with real users depending on it daily
• Bonus points: experience with map-based UIs, image processing pipelines, or building out a design system from scratch

What you won't be doing

Sitting in a design queue implementing someone else's static mockups with no say in the outcome. You'll be shaping how renters and landlords across an entire region actually experience the product, with real ownership over decisions, not just execution.

Why this one's worth a look

You'd be an early technical hire on a product that's already live, verified, and solving a real trust problem in a real, underserved market. No layers of approval, no bureaucracy slowing things down. Just fast decisions, direct access to the founder, and your work shipping to real users within days of building it, not buried in a sprint backlog for months.

Interested? Send a note with something you've built recently that you're proud of, doesn't need to be polished or fancy, just real work that shows how you think.

• See what we're building: northlease.ca | instagram.com/norlease