Meet Sumit Bajracharya: Building the Interface of AI-Driven Hiring at Alva

Why Alva Labs

Sumit had been working remotely from Nepal for a US-based company. He wanted a new challenge and a reason to live in a new country.

His passion has always been frontend. Not just building things that work, but sweating the details of how they look and feel. How users interact with them. When he found a senior frontend role at Alva Labs with an opportunity to move to Sweden, he was immediately interested.

Then came the hiring process itself. After completing the psychometric tests, he was impressed by how accurately the results described him.

"It got me really curious how it all worked and how everything tied together. I already knew I wanted to be part of the team and the product."

Making complex data feel simple

The biggest frontend challenge at Alva Labs: there's a lot of data. And every data point matters.

For recruiters, even the smallest detail can influence a hiring decision. Every section on screen requires careful thought: how you display it, how recruiters interact with it. When building new screens, the team constantly asks questions. Will they see this icon? Will they know they can right-click on the cards? Should there be more detail in the tooltip, or should it be visible all the time?

Then there's the candidate side. If the interface feels clunky, candidates won't finish the process. That's a direct loss for the hiring team.

To make these calls, the team relies on A/B tests and PostHog metrics. For the candidate list sidebar, they tested whether users interacted more with a hover-open or a manual click. Data decided.

The stack

React. Tailwind. A custom design system. Modern, pragmatic, kept up to date.

The team doesn't shy away from big migrations. They've moved to TypeScript, switched from styled components to Tailwind, replaced Redux with Zustand, all while shipping new features. The frontend space moves fast. Alva Labs's engineering team moves with it.

The most interesting technical problem Sumit has worked on recently: proctoring for the logic test. AI models are more powerful than ever, which makes assessment integrity a real challenge. The team built a solution that detects suspicious browser activity during tests. It's live, the feedback has been strong, and it's now a core feature.

How design and engineering work together

Frontend engineers and designers work closely at Alva Labs. Sometimes more closely than frontend works with backend.

The process: designers collect and refine requirements, create final UI designs, then hand them over in a dedicated meeting. Engineers write a frontend discovery document: analysing the designs, identifying new components needed, flagging gaps in the design system. That document becomes the blueprint for tickets.

Since Alva Labs is AI-first, the team uses agents that read mappings between the design system and Figma to generate boilerplate code. Engineers then polish and connect it to the backend.

The collaboration goes both ways. Figma doesn't always capture the full user experience. So engineers build quick prototype URLs for designers to play with in the actual product. The recent navigation redesign worked exactly like that: frontend implemented an early draft, designers refined it in a live environment, and the result was better than either side would have built alone.

From frontend to full stack

When Sumit joined, he was purely frontend. He'd never worked with the backend technologies Alva uses. But contributing to the product at a larger scale meant understanding the full stack.

Alva Labs gave him the resources and support to get there. From having never worked in Python to shipping critical features end to end.

"I still mostly work on frontend, but having that knowledge of backend makes a real difference in how you approach things."

One thing people should know

"If you enjoy sweating the small UX details, turning complex data into something intuitive for thousands of users, and moving fast, you'll like it here. You'll be making key product decisions, not just executing specs."