We are looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer who treats the codebase as a product. You will set the technical direction for a multi-brand content platform: a headless CMS monorepo powered by Payload CMS and Next.js, with seven to eight brand sites and a checkout flow living in the same repository.
You will make architectural decisions that impact every module in the platform, including rendering and caching strategy, content modelling, design token architecture, and how the platform integrates with Cloud Run, Cloud CDN, load balancing, and observability.
You will work closely with product, backend engineers, infrastructure, and external vendor partners, and you will be the person other engineers come to when decisive technical calls need to be made. This role is not about owning a single module; it is about defining how every module gets built.
Roles and responsibilities
- Set the architectural direction for frontend features across the platform, including content modelling, rendering strategy, caching, and integrations.
- Define the platform-wide rendering and caching strategy, and codify when static generation, ISR, SSR, streaming, or client-side rendering applies, and why.
- Establish patterns for content modelling across brands in Payload CMS, including shared blocks, brand-specific overrides, and the boundaries between them.
- Own the shared component library and design token architecture, deciding what is shared, what is brand-owned, and how the system can absorb new brands without rewrites.
- Set platform-wide performance budgets, Core Web Vitals targets, and accessibility standards.
- Partner with infrastructure on the full delivery path, including Cloud Run services, Cloud CDN caching, load balancer configuration, structured logging, and live monitoring, so frontend reliability and performance are designed in from the start.
- Lead API contract, CMS hook, cache invalidation, and data-fetching design with backend engineers and vendor partners to ensure a coherent, performant integration story.
- Define and uphold the code review culture, coach reviewers, step in on architecturally consequential pull requests, and use reviews to drive thinking on performance, rendering technique, and maintainability.
- Lead the architecture decision record (ADR) process so the platform has a clear, navigable decision history that future engineers can read and trust.
- Drive the next phase of the headless CMS migration; the foundation is in place, and you will shape what the next phase of the platform looks like.
- Own the platform's performance trajectory, diagnosing, prioritising, and unblocking work on bundle size, hydration cost, render bottlenecks, and Core Web Vitals across all brands and flows.
- Make build-vs-buy and refactor-vs-replace decisions, and document the reasoning so the broader team can move quickly and confidently.
- Define engineering standards, patterns, and quality bars for the frontend platform, and bring the team along through documentation, examples, and pairing.
- Mentor mid-level engineers and help them grow into senior-level contributors through design guidance, feedback, and coaching.
Must Have
- Minimum 5–6 years of hands-on experience in frontend development, with deep expertise in building production-grade applications using React and/or Next.js.
- Significant experience building scalable, maintainable web applications, including substantial time operating at a senior level on a non-trivial production codebase.
- Deep working knowledge of Next.js (both App Router and Pages Router), including server components, client components, streaming, partial pre-rendering, and the trade-offs between rendering strategies in production.
- Strong working knowledge of React (version 18 or later), TypeScript, and modern CSS approaches such as Tailwind, Animations, and CSS Grid.
- Production experience defining content architecture in a headless CMS, including content models, collections, relationships, and clear separation of structure from presentation. Direct experience with Payload CMS is a strong plus and will be treated as a differentiator within this requirement.
- Strong system design instincts at both the application layer (monorepo structure, shared packages, design system boundaries, state and data flow) and the delivery layer (CDN behaviour, cache invalidation, edge versus origin logic, observability, and failure modes).
- A track record of owning performance at the platform level, including moving Core Web Vitals across a broad product surface and sustaining those improvements over time.
- Experience leading API contract and integration design with backend engineers, including data-fetching patterns that minimise waterfalls and maintain a coherent caching strategy.
- Experience setting engineering standards and patterns that other engineers adopt in practice, through mechanisms such as ADRs, design documents, and review culture.
- Strong commitment to accessibility as a first-class concern, including WCAG standards, semantic HTML, and practical experience testing with assistive technologies.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write design documents that help engineers and product partners converge on clear decisions.
Nice to Have
- Production experience with multi-brand or multi-tenant architectures, including design token systems, shared component libraries, and monorepo tooling at scale.
- Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform services relevant to delivery, such as Cloud Run, Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, and Cloud Logging.
- Working knowledge of CMS webhook-driven revalidation and on-demand caching strategies for headless architectures.
- Background in checkout, payments, or other high-stakes conversion flows where performance, reliability, and clarity directly impact revenue.
- Experience leading legacy-to-modern migrations at scale, particularly in frontend or platform contexts.
- Working knowledge of build tooling such as Webpack, Vite, or Turbopack, as well as CI/CD pipelines and containerised deployments.
- Working knowledge of database fundamentals, including schema design, indexing, and query performance considerations for frontend-facing workloads.
- Experience writing meaningful tests across multiple layers (unit, integration, end-to-end) and making pragmatic decisions about where to invest in test coverage.
Join Us
You will work alongside a KeystoneJS core contributor on a platform that is already beyond the proving stage: the foundation is built, and the next phase of direction is yours to help shape.
You will not inherit someone else's architecture; you will make the decisions that the next several years of the platform are built on. Seven to eight brand sites, a checkout flow, a headless CMS monorepo, meaningful infrastructure ownership, and a team small enough that your decisions are visible and durable.
This role is designed for someone who wants senior to describe not just the title but the scope, responsibility, and impact of the work.
