PRINCIPAL FRONTEND ENGINEER
KEY POINTS
• Owning the frontend as a platform
• $250,000 - $300,000 + Equity
• Business-critical product where performance, reliability, and correctness genuinely matter
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Due to continued growth, we’re supporting a high-scale digital platform used daily by professionals making high-stakes, time-sensitive decisions. The product handles large datasets, complex queries, and collaborative workflows, and is relied upon in moments where failure is not an option.
The engineering organization is entering a new phase of maturity. The frontend has proven product-market fit and now needs to evolve from “working” to working flawlessly as scale, data volume, and customer expectations continue to rise.
THE PRINCIPAL FRONTEND ENGINEER ROLE
This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with end-to-end ownership of the frontend platform.
You’ll set architectural direction for the frontend, resolve systemic reliability and performance issues, and build the foundations that allow other engineers to move faster without breaking things. This role sits at the intersection of frontend engineering and platform thinking — ensuring the product remains fast, resilient, and predictable as complexity increases.
You’ll work closely with product and backend teams, but your primary mandate is clear: make the frontend a first-class, production-grade system.
Key responsibilities include:
• Owning frontend reliability: error boundaries, state management, data consistency, and graceful degradation
• Driving performance improvements across large datasets, complex views, and data-heavy UIs
• Implementing virtualization, render optimization, and bundle performance strategies
• Building monitoring and observability to catch issues before users do
• Establishing testing strategies that prevent regressions at scale
• Creating abstractions and patterns that help engineers ship safely and confidently
• Leading major technical decisions and mentoring engineers through complex frontend migrations
• Remaining hands-on in production code while setting long-term direction
PRINCIPAL FRONTEND ENGINEER ESSENTIAL SKILLS
• 7+ years’ experience building frontend applications at scale
• Deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern frontend tooling
• Proven track record fixing real-world performance and reliability issues in production
• Strong opinions on frontend architecture, backed by experience
• Excellent understanding of state management, rendering behaviour, and browser performance
• Ability to think systemically about frontend as a platform, not just a UI layer
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving environments with evolving requirements
NICE TO HAVE
• Experience building or scaling data-heavy products (search, discovery, analytics, CRM, ATS, etc.)
• Exposure to complex filtering, querying, or visualization-driven interfaces
• Experience introducing observability, monitoring, or performance budgets to frontend systems
• Background in high-growth or product-led environments
• Ownership mindset from root cause through to durable, long-term fixes
TO BE CONSIDERED
Please either apply by clicking online or emailing me directly at james.roberts@searchability.com. I can make myself available outside of normal working hours between 7am and 8pm. If unavailable, please leave a message and either myself or one of my colleagues will respond.
By applying for this role, you give express consent for us to process and submit (subject to required skills) your application to our client in conjunction with this vacancy only.
KEY SKILLS
Principal Frontend Engineer, Frontend Architecture, React, TypeScript, Performance Optimization, Frontend Infrastructure, Observability, Monitoring, State Management, Large-Scale Frontend Systems
