Front End Architect

Role Summary

The Frontend Architect is a technical leadership role within the Platform Team, responsible for guiding teams in delivering exceptional user experiences through sound technical strategy, design systems, and implementation standards across the product suite. This role ensures a cohesive, high-quality user experience across web and mobile interfaces serving small, medium, and large enterprise customers in the HR and payroll domain.

This role works alongside Engineering Leads and Senior Software Engineers, providing technical direction, mentorship, and strategic guidance for all front-end and user experience initiatives across feature teams and platform services.

Key Responsibilities:

UI/UX Strategy & Vision

• Lead the development and communication of the UI/UX technical vision for the product suite, building consensus across teams and ensuring consistency across web and mobile platforms.
• Collaborate with teams to establish UX principles, patterns, and guidelines tailored to the needs of HR and payroll users across different customer segments (SMB through to large enterprise).
• Champion user-centred design thinking across engineering teams, mentoring engineers to balance user needs with technical feasibility and delivery pragmatism.
• Guide teams to embed accessibility (WCAG compliance), internationalisation, and responsive design as core considerations in all front-end work.

Technology Selection & Implementation Standards

• Lead the evaluation and recommendation of front-end technology choices for web and mobile, facilitating team input and selecting best-of-breed UI frameworks that integrate effectively with the existing .NET backend ecosystem.
• Guide teams in establishing reference implementations for front-end applications, including component structure, state management, API integration patterns, and micro-frontend or modular approaches where appropriate.
• Work with teams to establish standards for mobile development (native, cross-platform, or hybrid) aligned with product requirements and team capabilities.
• Drive the technical strategy for the design system / component library, enabling teams to build and contribute reusable, well-documented, and testable UI components across all delivery teams.

Design System Leadership

• Lead teams in creating and evolving a unified design system (tokens, components, patterns, documentation) that serves as the single source of truth for UI implementation.
• Coach teams on contribution models so that feature teams can extend the design system while maintaining consistency and quality.
• Collaborate with teams to establish design-to-code workflows and tooling standards (e.g., Figma-to-code pipelines, Storybook, visual regression tooling), ensuring adoption through training and support.

Quality & Testing Leadership

• Partner with teams to define and evolve the front-end and UX testing strategy, including unit testing, component testing, integration testing, visual regression testing, accessibility testing, and end-to-end UI testing.
• Guide teams in selecting and standardising testing frameworks and tooling, building consensus and ensuring successful adoption.
• Work with teams to establish performance budgets, Core Web Vitals targets, and monitoring for front-end applications, providing training and support.
• Lead teams in defining and implementing standards for cross-browser, cross-device, and cross-platform testing.

Collaboration & Team Enablement

• Support Engineering Leads and Senior Software Engineers on front-end and UX implementation decisions, helping them grow their technical leadership capabilities.
• Lead design reviews, technical spikes, and proof-of-concept work for new UI/UX capabilities, involving team members and building shared understanding.
• Facilitate alignment between product design intent and engineering implementation, bridging the gap between UX designers (internal or external) and development teams through collaborative workshops and reviews.
• Lead hiring initiatives, technical assessment, and capability development for front-end and UX skills across the engineering organisation, building a strong front-end engineering culture.

Platform & Cross-Cutting Concerns

• Guide teams to ensure front-end solutions support multi-tenancy, theming/white-labelling, and configuration-driven UI where required for enterprise customers.
• Collaborate with teams to define and implement approaches for shared concerns such as authentication flows, notification patterns, navigation patterns, error handling, and loading states.
• Partner with platform engineers to ensure API contracts, GraphQL schemas, or BFF (Backend-for-Frontend) layers are optimised for front-end consumption, representing front-end team needs.

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

• Significant experience (6+ years) in software engineering with deep expertise in front-end development and UX implementation at scale, including leading technical initiatives across teams.
• Proven experience leading and influencing UI/UX technical strategies across multiple product teams or a product suite, balancing team autonomy with consistency.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of modern front-end frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue, Blazor) with the ability to guide teams in selecting the right tool for the context.
• Experience with mobile application frameworks and strategies (e.g., React Native, .NET MAUI, Flutter, or progressive web apps).
• Experience leading or contributing to design systems and component libraries at an organisational level, with a focus on team adoption and contribution.
• Strong understanding of front-end testing strategies, tooling, and automation (e.g., Jest, Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, Chromatic), with experience coaching teams in their adoption.
• Experience working within or alongside .NET / C# backend ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of API design from a front-end consumer perspective (REST, GraphQL, real-time/SignalR).
• Experience building UX for enterprise SaaS applications, ideally in HR, payroll, finance, or similarly complex workflow-driven domains.
• Excellent communication and mentorship skills with the ability to influence and align both technical and non-technical stakeholders across multiple teams.

Desirable

• Experience with enterprise concerns such as multi-tenancy, white-labelling, RBAC-driven UI, and configuration-driven interfaces.
• Familiarity with UX research methods and usability testing, even if not a hands-on researcher.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines for front-end artefacts, including versioning and publishing of shared component packages.
• Knowledge of performance optimisation techniques (code splitting, lazy loading, SSR/SSG, CDN strategies) and ability to teach these to teams.
• Experience mentoring, coaching, or leading front-end engineering capability across distributed teams.
• Understanding of design tooling ecosystems (Figma, design tokens, handoff workflows) and experience facilitating designer-developer collaboration.

Key Outcomes (First 12 Months)

1. Technology & Framework Recommendation – Lead the evaluation and recommendation process for the web and mobile UI technology stack, building team consensus and securing engineering leadership approval.
2. Design System Foundation – Guide teams to establish a foundational design system with core components, documentation, and a contribution model successfully adopted by at least two delivery teams.
3. Front-End Reference Implementation – Work with teams to create reference implementations and guidelines that delivery teams actively follow for new front-end work.
4. Testing Strategy – Collaborate with teams to define and successfully roll out a standardised front-end and UX testing strategy with agreed tooling and measurable coverage improvements.
5. Team Enablement – Upskill and support Senior Engineers and Engineering Leads in front-end best practices through mentoring, pairing, reviews, workshops, and documentation.