Principal Frontend Engineer

UST; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

UST is seeking a Principal Frontend Engineer to elevate frontend quality across delivery teams. This senior role is hands-on and architectural, not people management, with influence on component design, code reviews, and production readiness.

You will work closely with engineers to build maintainable, accessible UIs using modern component-based frameworks, primarily Vue.js, with emphasis on architectural depth and strong TypeScript skills.

Qualifications

• Proficient in TypeScript and modern frontend tooling.
• Experience with Vue.js; React experience also relevant if architecture is strong.

Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership for frontend engineering across delivery teams.
• Write production-quality TypeScript code in Vue.js environments.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, and code reviews.
• Define reusable frontend standards, component libraries, and engineering guidelines.
• Ensure architecture decisions lead to maintainable, scalable, and secure interfaces.

Skills

TypeScript

Vue.js

React

Frontend architecture

Component-based design

Code reviews

Mentoring

Performance optimization

Job description

We are looking for a Principal Frontend Engineer who can raise frontend engineering quality across delivery teams through hands‑on contribution, technical leadership, mentoring, and strong architectural execution.

This is a senior hands‑on technical leadership role, not a people‑management position.

Your influence will come from the quality of your frontend architecture, your code, your component design, your code reviews, your ability to mentor engineers, and your capacity to help teams deliver consistent, maintainable, accessible, and production‑ready user interfaces.

You will remain close to the code every day.

You will help teams make good design decisions, improve implementation quality, review pull requests, solve difficult frontend engineering problems, establish reusable patterns, and maintain a high bar for production readiness.

This role requires excellent TypeScript engineering skills and deep experience with modern component‑based frontend frameworks.

Vue.js experience is strongly preferred. Strong React experience is also relevant, provided you have the architectural depth to work effectively with complex component‑based applications and can apply those principles in a Vue‑based environment.

We are looking for engineers whose recent experience is centred on modern frontend application architecture. Experience primarily based on legacy approaches such as jQuery‑heavy applications, server‑side page frameworks, or traditional server‑rendered MVC applications is not sufficient for this role.

You know how to build complex enterprise interfaces that remain maintainable as the product grows: component libraries, design systems, state management, API integration, validation, accessibility, performance, testability, security, and long‑term evolution.

You understand that frontend technical leadership is not simply about visual polish.

It requires building reliable engineering foundations for complex applications used by bankers, operators, administrators, and delivery teams.

That means working with engineers in the details: component boundaries, state ownership, rendering behaviour, route design, forms, validation, error states, loading states, API contracts, accessibility, testing, browser behaviour, performance, security, and maintainability.

In an environment increasingly supported by AI‑assisted development, you apply strong engineering judgment to validate, refine, and sometimes reject generated output. AI‑assisted frontend code must meet the same standards for correctness, usability, accessibility, resilience, security, performance, modularity, and maintainability as manually written code.

We value a collaborative, merit‑driven engineering culture. Technical leaders are expected to challenge weak designs constructively, help engineers improve, simplify unnecessary complexity, and raise engineering standards through practical execution.

What You Will Do

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership for frontend engineering across one or more delivery teams.
• Write production‑quality TypeScript and modern component‑based frontend code, primarily within a Vue.js environment.
• Guide engineers through frontend design, implementation, testing, review, refactoring, and production readiness.
• Translate product requirements, platform architecture, and UX designs into well‑structured frontend applications, reusable components, consistent interaction patterns, and maintainable user journeys.
• Define and promote reusable frontend standards covering component architecture, state management, API integration, routing, validation, error handling, accessibility, performance, testing, security, and code organisation.
• Design, build, and evolve component libraries, shared UI patterns, reusable frontend utilities, reference implementations, and engineering guidelines.
• Use code reviews to improve correctness, maintainability, component quality, test coverage, accessibility, performance, security, and engineering discipline.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, debugging, refactoring, code reviews, and practical implementation guidance.
• Guide teams on component‑driven architecture, including component boundaries, composition, reuse, lifecycle behaviour, properties, events, slots or equivalent composition mechanisms, design tokens, and integration with shared design systems.
• Guide teams on frontend state management, including local state, shared application state, server state, caching, synchronisation, loading states, error states, and predictable data flow.
• Help teams build reliable API integrations including contract discipline, validation, authentication‑aware behaviour, error handling, pagination, filtering, sorting, asynchronous processing, and real‑time updates where appropriate.
• Define and improve frontend testing strategies including unit, component, integration, end‑to‑end, accessibility, regression, and automated UI testing.
• Identify and remove frontend technical debt, inconsistent patterns, fragile components, duplicated logic, weak state management, poor accessibility, performance bottlenecks, and implementation patterns that compromise long‑term maintainability.
• Ensure frontend applications are observable, performant, secure, accessible, testable, maintainable, and suitable for complex enterprise banking workflows.
• Work closely with backend engineers, architects, UX designers, QA engineers, platform engineers, DevOps engineers, product teams, and client‑facing delivery teams.
• Ensure that delivery speed does not come at the expense of engineering quality.
• Create reusable examples, reference implementations, frontend standards, coding guidelines, and technical documentation that raise engineering quality across multiple teams.

You will influence multiple engineering teams, establish reusable standards, mentor technical leaders, challenge weak designs, and help translate technical direction into production‑quality execution.

This is not a passive advisory role and not a traditional people‑management position.

Your authority will come from technical credibility, judgment, execution, and your ability to make other engineers better.

You will work closely with the CTO to establish technical standards, identify engineering gaps, raise implementation quality, create reusable frontend patterns, and ensure that architectural direction is reflected in real code and operational behaviour.

The objective is to act as a technical force multiplier across the engineering organization.

Skills and Experience We Are Looking For

• Minimum 7 years of professional frontend software engineering experience, ideally 810 years, with meaningful hands‑on ownership of complex production frontend applications.
• Excellent TypeScript engineering skills with strong understanding of type safety, modularity, asynchronous programming, maintainability, browser behaviour, and production‑grade frontend development.
• Deep experience with a modern component‑based frontend framework. Vue.js is preferred; strong React experience is also relevant.
• Recent experience building modern client‑side applications rather than primarily working with legacy frontend or server‑rendered UI technologies.
• Strong frontend architecture experience, with the ability to design applications that remain consistent, scalable, testable, and maintainable as product complexity grows.
• Strong experience with component‑driven architecture, including reusable components, component libraries, design systems, composition strategies, and shared frontend standards.
• Strong understanding of modern HTML and CSS, responsive layouts, semantic markup, browser APIs, and cross‑browser behaviour.
• Strong state‑management experience covering local state, application state, server state, caching, synchronisation, predictable data flow, and avoiding unnecessary global‑state complexity.
• Strong API‑integration experience including RESTful APIs, contracts, request handling, validation, authentication‑aware flows, error handling, pagination, filtering, sorting, and asynchronous updates.
• Strong understanding of frontend testing strategies including unit, component, integration, end‑to‑end, accessibility, and automated regression testing.
• Strong frontend performance‑engineering skills including rendering behaviour, unnecessary re‑rendering, bundle size, code splitting, lazy loading, caching, network optimisation, memory usage, responsiveness, and browser diagnostics.
• Strong understanding of accessibility including semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, focus management, ARIA, screen‑reader behaviour, accessible forms, colour and contrast requirements, and practical WCAG‑aligned implementation.
• Strong understanding of frontend security including browser security boundaries, authentication flows, authorization‑aware behaviour, token handling, input and output handling, content‑security controls, dependency risk, and common web‑application vulnerabilities.
• Extensive code‑review experience, with the ability to identify design flaws, maintainability risks, inconsistent patterns, missing tests, accessibility issues, performance problems, security weaknesses, and fragile API integrations.
• Strong understanding of frontend production concerns including usability, reliability, security, observability, scalability, performance, maintainability, and operational support.
• Experience designing reusable frontend foundations consumed by multiple teams rather than building only application‑specific components.
• Strong mentoring capability, with the ability to guide engineers constructively, raise standards without creating unnecessary friction, and improve teams through example and daily collaboration.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain frontend architecture decisions, trade‑offs, risks, and implementation approaches clearly across globally distributed engineering teams.

Preferred