Principal Front End Engineer

Our client is a leading global ecommerce marketplace.Members can explore products from hundreds of brands, ordering until midnight (ET), and receive everything in a single box by 10:30 AM the next day - all for free.The business is rapidly expanding its reach into B2C with the launch of a new platform - a modern commerce platform built to replace a legacy system to serve the needs of brands at scale.About the role:They are now seeking a Principal Front End Engineer to set the technical vision for their front-end platform and drive its architecture, tooling, and delivery across multiple teams. You'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and design — shaping not just how features get built, but what gets prioritized and why. You'll set the technical direction for tooling and technology choices across the front-end organization, define integration standards with backend engineering, and hold end-to-end accountability for the site's engineering foundations: SEO, analytics, monitoring, performance, and testing strategy. You'll also be a force multiplier for the engineering org — raising the technical bar through mentorship, architecture reviews, and by modeling how ambiguous, cross-team problems get solved.What you’ll do:Own and evolve the front-end architecture for a brand-new platform, setting technical direction that other engineers and teams build on, and ensuring it holds up against a multi-year roadmap, not just the next release.Partner with Product, Design, and QA leadership to shape "the right things the right way" at a strategic level — influencing what gets built before it reaches the design/wireframe stage.Set the standard for performance, scalability, accessibility, and responsive design across the platform, and build the tooling and guardrails that make it easy for other engineers to meet that bar by default.Define and drive adoption of documentation, coding standards, and architectural best practices across the front-end org, not just within one team.Lead the strategy and execution to rewrite, refactor, and decouple the frontend from CommerceTools to a NextJS app, including the testing approach (Playwright).Define the strategy for SEO, site analytics, A/B testing, and monitoring, select the tools and platform investments, and drive org-wide adoption.Serve as a technical escalation point and thought partner for other engineering leads; represent front-end engineering in architecture and technical steering discussions.Champion the use of AI tools across the SDLC — architecture, code reviews, and test creation — to accelerate delivery, acting as a force multiplier and mentor for teammates.Enable designers and PMs to make pull requests using AI tools, lowering the barrier for non-engineers to contribute directly to the codebase.What you’ll bring:Experience using AI tools to improve efficiency in software architecture, code reviews, and software testing12+ years of experience building and scaling production front-end systems, including React and its ecosystem, with a track record of setting technical direction beyond your own team.Deep expertise in React, JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, and CSS (including SASS/LESS), with the judgment to know when to deviate from convention.Demonstrated experience influencing technical strategy across multiple teams or a full engineering org, not just within a single codebase.Strong track record mentoring and growing senior/staff-level engineers.Comfort operating in ambiguity — defining problems and roadmaps, not just solving pre-defined tickets.Fluency in UI/UX principles and cross-browser/performance considerations, with the ability to set standards other engineers follow.Preferred Requirements:Experience building e-commerce customer portals at scale.Experience leading frontend architecture decisions for a platform serving high concurrent traffic.Knowledge of CommerceTools.Tech stack: React, JavaScript/TypeScript, NextJS, Storybook, React Query, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, New Relic, Sentry, Slack, GitHub, Jira, Notion.Excellent package on offer.