Frontend Tech Lead

Frontend Tech LeadWe build and operate Connect, a SaaS platform for the beauty & wellness industry that helps entrepreneurs run their businesses more effectively. Our web products are used daily by tens of thousands of people across 13 European countries. Our teams own their areas end-to-end - from initial idea and design through deployment and operations. We focus on writing maintainable, scalable code while balancing legacy and modern technologies, and we encourage engineers to experiment, learn from mistakes, and improve our systems continuously. As Frontend Tech Lead, you sit at the intersection of technical leadership and people leadership. Your job is not to make every decision, but to create the conditions in which good decisions get made consistently - across teams, across codebases, and across the organisation. Our Frontend StackThe frontend stack is a mix of legacy and modern technologies. The application originally grew as a Backbone-based product, served through Node/Express with EJS templates, and there are still important areas of the product that work this way today. At the same time, the team is actively migrating toward a more modern React and TypeScript architecture, delivered through a gradual, page-by-page and feature-by-feature transition. Most new development happens in the modern React/TypeScript stack - React Query, Storybook, Jest, Cypress - while some work still involves the legacy Backbone codebase and the integration layer between old and new. The migration itself is one of the key technical threads you ll help shape and drive forward. You will be responsible for: Lead the Frontend Guild • Make the guild a space engineers genuinely want to participate in - one that surfaces real problems, shares knowledge, and produces outputs (standards, patterns, tooling choices, ADRs) that teams actually use. • Treat the guild as your most powerful lever - when it s working well, it multiplies your impact far beyond what you could achieve alone. Set technical direction and maintain quality • Own the frontend technical direction for your vertical. • Define guardrails and standards that give teams speed and confidence, not ones that slow them down. • Stay close to architectural and technical decisions across teams. • Make sure technical debt and risks are visible and actively managed. • Drive initiatives that make consistent, measurable progress. • Define what healthy looks like for frontend systems - instrumentation standards, alerting principles, SLO patterns - so reliability is a first-class concern, not an afterthought. • Work with Engineering Managers and the Head of Engineering to ensure technical work is prioritised alongside product work. Build relationships and grow the people around you • Take the time to understand each team - how they work, what they re dealing with, and where their strengths lie. • Know which teams can operate autonomously within the guardrails and which need more active coaching, and invest your time accordingly. • Actively mentor engineers in your vertical, helping them grow their technical scope and develop the habit of thinking beyond their immediate team. • Foster a culture of curiosity, craft and continuous improvement - not just in the guild, but in the day-to-day rhythm of the teams you work with. Bridge engineering and the wider organisation • Communicate technical trade-offs, risks and decisions clearly to non-technical partners - in terms of impact, not implementation detail. • Work with Engineering Managers to keep technical health and delivery in balance. • You re not downstream of product direction - you help shape it. About you: 10+ years of software development experience, with deep expertise in modern web frontend technologies and a track record of operating across teams and codebases - not just within one. • You have set technical direction before. You know what it takes to define standards that engineers actually follow, and you understand that the quality of your relationships is often what determines whether your architectural agenda lands or not. • You are a natural builder of trust. You invest in understanding the people and teams you work with - their strengths, their constraints, their context - and you use that understanding to lead more effectively, not to manage more tightly. • You adapt your leadership style to what the situation requires. When teams are engaged and capable, you focus on enabling and elevating. When they re not, you roll up your sleeves, build the relationship, and earn the right to lead. • You can hold technical depth and organisational breadth at the same time. You re credible in an architectural review and equally comfortable in a conversation with an Engineering Manager or a product stakeholder. • Excellent English communication skills - you can articulate complex technical ideas clearly to engineers, designers, and non-technical partners alike. • You lead by example. The code you write...