Data & BI
Hire D3.js Developers
Engineers who build the visualisations a charting library cannot, and keep them readable.
D3 earns its place at the boundary where charting libraries run out - network and dependency graphs, timelines with irregular structure, custom geographic work, anything with a bespoke interaction model. The cost is real, so the honest position is that most charts should not be built with it, and a good D3 engineer will tell you that unprompted.
When hiring, ask what they built in D3 and why a library could not do it. Then ask about accessibility and about performance, since a custom visualisation is invisible to a screen reader unless somebody deliberately made it otherwise, and SVG stops being viable somewhere in the low thousands of elements. Engineers who understand visual encoding talk about the reader. Everyone else talks about the animation.
What these engineers do
- D3 v7 scales, shapes and layouts composed with React or plain DOM rendering
- Canvas and WebGL rendering for the point counts at which SVG stops coping
- Interaction design - brushing, zooming, linked views and tooltips that stay usable
- Accessible charts with text alternatives, keyboard access and colour-safe palettes
- Knowing when Recharts, Vega-Lite or ECharts is a better answer than custom D3
Delivered AI-first
AI assistance is used for the parts of D3 that are pure mechanics - scale and axis setup, data joins, layout maths, responsive resize handling and the boilerplate of wiring a visualisation into a React component. Encoding decisions are not delegated, because choosing what to map to position, length or colour is the difference between a chart that informs and one that misleads, and a generated default will happily do the latter. Review discipline is unchanged. The measurable effect is throughput per engineer, not fewer reviews.