About the role
- Principal Team Lead (Front End)
- Reports to: VP of Engineering
- Direct reports: 3-5 Frontend Tech Team Leads
- Hybrid role combining technical leadership, organisational strategy, and people management.
What you'll be doing
- People Leadership
- Manage and grow 3-5 Tech Team Leads, coaching on leadership, delivery, and technical excellence.
- Support career development plans and performance reviews for the Tech Team Leads and their direct reports.
- Promote and exemplify the Xelix Culture Behaviours (Be Productive, Be Proactive, Keep Improving and Be Collaborative).
- Assist with defining team structures, e.g. squad formation, and defining ways of working for teams.
- Frontend Technical Strategy & Alignment
- Define and maintain frontend architecture standards (React + TypeScript), ensuring consistency across squads.
- Set conventions for component architecture, routing, state management, and data fetching patterns.
- Support the design system and shared component library direction, including governance and adoption.
- Drive front end performance strategy and ensure teams have the tooling to measure and improve it.
- Establish frontend observability best practices (error monitoring, user impact visibility, and actionable dashboards).
- Stay hands on by reviewing key code, participating in design sessions, and providing technical guidance.
- Contribute to the codebase (approximately 30 % of your time).
- Introduce tools and techniques to help the tech team go faster.
- Delivery & Quality
- Ensure your teams are delivering code every day.
- Define and champion the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process.
- Act as a quality guardian through code reviews, incident management and developer training.
- Promote the use of AI by the engineering team.
- Cross Team Leadership
- Act as a trusted liaison between Senior Leadership and Tech Leads, balancing strategic priorities with team realities.
- Facilitate collaboration across squads for shared services and platform initiatives.
What you'll bring
- Proven experience leading multiple teams or managers.
- Deep experience building and scaling React applications (ideally with TypeScript).
- Strong understanding of front end architecture and modern web fundamentals (performance, browser constraints, and build tooling).
- Experience setting direction for testing strategy across the frontend (unit/component/e2e).
- Excellent coaching and mentoring skills; ability to develop strong leaders.
- Experience scaling engineering teams from 5 to 50 engineers is a plus.
- Strong communication and influence skills, with a servant leadership mindset.
What we offer in return
- Competitive salary of £85,000 £125,000 depending on experience.
- 27 days of annual leave (including 3 days Christmas closing) which increases up to 3 days based on tenure, with the option to roll over, buy or sell up to 3 days.
- Hybrid working with one day a week from our dog friendly Hoxton office.
- On site gym and cycle to work scheme.
- Employee discount at over 100 retailers.
- Comprehensive private medical & dental cover with Vitality.
- Enhanced parental leave pay.
- Learning & development culture - £1,000 personal annual budget.
- We're carbon neutral and are working towards ambitious carbon reduction goals.
- Lots of team socials & activities.
- Annual team retreat.
We believe that people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences make our company and product better. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you! And if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!
This is a full-time position, with standard working hours from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.