Senior Front End Engineer

Role Overview

This role builds the front end of Ignition's advice platform, the screens our clients' customers use to get advice, whether on their own or with an adviser. You will develop new features in React and TypeScript, from the first conversation with Product through to production.

You will work in an agile scrum team within front end engineering, partnering with Product and business stakeholders to understand what's needed, and with other developers to work out how to build it well. Alongside your own delivery, you will have a real say in how the front end application is designed and how the team works.

This is a hands on senior engineering role. Most of your time will go on writing, testing, and reviewing code, and the bar is high: the features you ship come with automated tests, meet accessibility standards, and leave the code base in better shape than you found it.

Being senior here also means making the people around you better. You will pair with and mentor more junior developers, and help them build good engineering habits early.

Your Responsibilities

• Build new features on Ignition's core advice platform in React and TypeScript, taking them from requirement through to production.
• Work directly with Product and business stakeholders to understand what they need, asking the questions that turn a loose request into something that can be built and tested.
• Use test driven development, and ship every feature with automated unit, integration, and end to end tests. A feature isn't done until it's properly tested.
• Contribute to front end application architecture and solution design, bringing a clear view on how a feature should be built so it holds up as the platform grows.
• Build interfaces that use semantic HTML properly and meet accessibility standards, so the platform works for every customer who uses it, whatever device or assistive technology they rely on.
• Find and fix performance problems in complex interactive screens, using instrumentation and monitoring to understand what's actually happening rather than guessing.
• Pair with and mentor more junior developers, reviewing their work in a way that helps them improve rather than just correcting it.
• Help shape the team's development standards and practices, and hold your own work to them consistently.
• Play a full part in the scrum team's rhythm, including sprint planning, showcases, and retrospectives.

You will bring

• Strong experience building complex web applications in React and TypeScript, using functional components and hooks.
• Experience contributing to front end application architecture, with a good working knowledge of software design patterns and when they're worth using.
• A test first mindset, with hands on experience in test automation using tools such as Jest and Cypress.
• A solid understanding of semantic HTML and web accessibility. You treat accessibility as part of building something properly, not an extra at the end.
• Experience tracking down and fixing performance bottlenecks in complex interactive applications.
• Experience with front end build tools and CI/CD pipelines, including fine tuning instrumentation and monitoring.
• Comfort working in Agile Scrum teams, using Jira, Confluence, and Git day to day.
• Clear communication with non technical stakeholders. You can explain a technical trade off in terms of what it means for the user or the timeline.
• A genuine interest in developing others. You get as much from helping a junior developer reach the answer themselves as from solving it yourself.
• Tertiary qualifications in Information Technology or a related discipline.

Desirable

• Experience with common AWS technologies.
• Experience in financial services, fintech, or another regulated environment.
• Understanding of BFF technologies such as tRPC, graphQL and patterns

On any given day you might

• Talk through a new feature with the Product team, flagging early where the design will be hard to build and suggesting a simpler way to reach the same outcome.
• Write the tests first for a new customer journey, then build until they pass.
• Pair with a junior developer on a tricky piece of state management, letting them drive while you ask the questions.
• Dig into a slow screen using the monitoring tools, find the component causing the problem, and fix it.
• Review a teammate's pull request and leave comments that explain the why, not just the what.
• Check a new form with a screen reader before it goes to testing, while accessibility issues are still cheap to fix.
• Demo a feature you've built at the quarterly business showcase and answer questions from people outside Technology.
• Bring a better approach to the team's tooling or testing to a retrospective, then own making the change.