Senior Frontend Engineer: Lead React/Next.js Apps

Digital Waffle; England; On-site; GBP 42,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

Digital Waffle is seeking an experienced Senior Frontend Engineer (React/Next.js) to lead the design, delivery and continuous improvement of customer-facing applications with high autonomy.

You’ll mentor engineers, influence technical direction and collaborate with product and design teams to translate user needs into robust solutions, ensuring performance, accessibility and reliability.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience building and operating React/Next.js apps.
• Excellent understanding of frontend architecture and modern practices.
• Proven experience improving web performance and scalability.
• Strong systems thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing decisions across teams.
• Customer-focused mindset with accessibility and user-centered design.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP, including cost/performance considerations.
• Understanding of SRE principles, monitoring and production support.
• Excellent communication to bridge technical and non-technical perspectives.
• Proactive learning, experimentation and continuous improvement.

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 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

Performance optimization

Mentoring

Cloud (GCP)

SRE concepts

Accessibility

User-centered design

Communication

Job description

Digital Waffle is seeking an experienced Senior Frontend Engineer (React/Next.js) to lead the design, delivery and continuous improvement of customer-facing applications with high autonomy.

You’ll mentor engineers, influence technical direction and collaborate with product and design teams to translate user needs into robust solutions, ensuring performance, accessibility and reliability.