Frontend Engineering Lead – Principal Engineer

hastingsdirect; Leicester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Hastings Direct is transforming how it builds and scales technology across the organisation. We’re seeking an experienced Principal Engineer (Front End) to lead engineering excellence within the CIO’s Technology Engineering function, shaping standards and driving meaningful business impact.

You will mentor engineers, own high‑priority delivery, and champion continuous learning while partnering with stakeholders to improve speed, reliability, and quality across the SDLC.

Qualifications

• Strong transformational leadership with the ability to influence decisions
• Excellent mentoring and people development capability
• Extensive experience in application and/or web development within an Agile environment

Responsibilities

• Provide line management, mentoring and feedback to engineers
• Address high-priority technical challenges and influence project direction
• Improve delivery pipeline and reuse existing platforms to maximise efficiency
• Lead the Centre of Excellence for the domain and drive best practices

Skills

Transformational leadership

Mentoring

Agile development

Tools

Jira

Octane

Azure DevOps

Jenkins

GitHub

Job description

Hastings Direct is transforming how it builds and scales technology across the organisation. We’re seeking an experienced Principal Engineer (Front End) to lead engineering excellence within the CIO’s Technology Engineering function, shaping standards and driving meaningful business impact.

You will mentor engineers, own high‑priority delivery, and champion continuous learning while partnering with stakeholders to improve speed, reliability, and quality across the SDLC.