Frontend Lead - React/Next.js, Mentorship & Scalable UI

Digital Waffle; Hereford; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Digital Waffle is seeking a Frontend Engineer (React/Next.js) to lead the design, delivery and continual improvement of customer-facing applications. You will work with autonomy, influence technical direction and mentor engineers to foster a culture of customer value and engineering excellence.

You will design and evolve scalable React/Next.js apps and shared components, define frontend standards, and drive performance, accessibility and reliability improvements across teams.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience building React/Next.js applications.
• Strong frontend architecture and performance optimization skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decisions across teams.
• Customer-focused mindset with accessibility and user-centered design.

Responsibilities

• Lead customer-focused delivery, prioritising incremental value and a test-and-learn approach.
• Mentor and coach engineers, raising technical quality and engineering standards.
• Design and evolve scalable React / Next.js applications and shared component libraries.
• Define frontend architecture, technical direction and development standards across teams.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, accessibility, security and reliability.
• Monitor and optimise frontend performance, bundle sizes, rendering and client-side health.
• Improve state management and component architecture across large-scale applications.
• Champion modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development and agentic workflows, with appropriate code review and quality controls.
• Work closely with product, design, research and engineering teams to translate user needs into effective technical solutions.
• Support production services, diagnose complex issues and improve system resilience and stability.
• Contribute to SDLC, testing, quality standards and across engineering teams.

Skills

React

Next.js

Frontend architecture

Web performance

Mentoring engineers

Communication

Cloud platforms (GCP)

SRE concepts

Agile working

Tools

GCP

Job description

Digital Waffle is seeking a Frontend Engineer (React/Next.js) to lead the design, delivery and continual improvement of customer-facing applications. You will work with autonomy, influence technical direction and mentor engineers to foster a culture of customer value and engineering excellence.

You will design and evolve scalable React/Next.js apps and shared components, define frontend standards, and drive performance, accessibility and reliability improvements across teams.