After a Decade in London, a React Core Veteran Wants to Work in Japan

Dan Abramov, best known for his years on the React team at Meta and his recent work on the Bluesky app, is looking for his next engineering role. The catch: he wants the job to come with visa sponsorship for Japan, where he plans to relocate within the next year.

He’s open to hearing from companies that can sponsor a software engineering visa and can reach him at [email protected].

Recent Work: Quality-Focused Mobile Engineering

Since 2023, Abramov has been working on the official Bluesky client app built with React Native. His contributions centered on app quality improvements, including implementing lightbox animations, syncing feed swipe gestures, and introducing custom lint rules to prevent runtime crashes. He also worked on shaving seconds off the Android start time.

Several projects required deep multi-week investigations and substantial refactors:

  • Rewriting the lightbox to work well on Android
  • Reworking the cross-platform layout for web support
  • Revamping how threads appear in the feed
  • Rebuilding the post composer into a thread composer

Because much of the underlying stack was open source, Abramov occasionally traced bugs down to the dependencies themselves. That led to fixes and findings in projects like Reanimated, React Native—including a fix for a decade-old ScrollView bug—and documentation around gesture handling.

Alongside his individual contributions, he took on engineering management and mentoring duties, helping the team build a mental model for React, coaching on root-cause analysis, and pushing for closer collaboration with the backend team so organizational splits wouldn't surface as poor UX. He also helped explain the AT Protocol to a broader audience through a talk and his article Open Social.

Before Bluesky, Abramov spent 2015–2023 on the React team at Meta. High-visibility work there included co-writing the React documentation, leading the public messaging and rollout of React Hooks, implementing Fast Refresh for hot reloading, and co-creating Create React App. He also contributed to bug fixes and build infrastructure over the years.

His pre-Facebook work includes co-creating Redux (initially a conference demo), building React Hot Loader and React DnD, and creating normalizr, a utility later used by Twitter.

What He’s Looking For

Abramov’s core engineering expertise is UI engineering and web development, with React as his primary toolkit. He wants an opportunity where his experience is useful and where quality is genuinely valued—he prefers digging into root causes over applying surface-level fixes. He's comfortable writing for a technical audience, whether in code or prose, and while he prefers open source work, it isn’t a requirement.

He's most fluent in JavaScript and TypeScript but has recently picked up some Lean and has been using LLMs heavily. He’s open to new stacks, though he notes that learning something unfamiliar will involve some ramp-up time—he learned React Native while at Bluesky, so the pattern is established.

Why Japan?

The decision is personal. After short stays in Kyoto over the past year, Abramov and his wife realized London no longer felt like home. Paying rent in two cities, dealing with flights, and wanting to adopt a cat eventually forced a choice. Kyoto won.

The practical hurdle is language. He’s learned hiragana and katakana and has started on N5 grammar and vocabulary, but he expects Japanese to take a few years to get fluent. That means his best visa route is likely an international company with a Japanese presence or a Japanese company that allows remote work and communicates in English—he acknowledges there likely aren’t many tech employers in Kyoto itself.

He’s already talking to a few companies but posted this to get a fuller picture of what’s possible. The goal is a real job that comes with a working visa, allowing him to settle in Japan rather than return as a tourist.

If you can sponsor that visa and think he’d be a fit, the contact is [email protected].