Senior Front End Engineer at NOBLE PANACEA, London, 3 Months, £Contract Rate

Noble Panacea is a new revolutionary skincare brand founded by Nobel Laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart and launched in October 2019. The ground-breaking OSMV™ Technology at the core of the brand enables transformational efficacy and precision. We create deep respect & intention by adhering to the global principles of green chemistry. We take our commitment to nature and sustainability to all stages of product development, from R&D to packaging. Ultimately, we strive to promote absolute skin health by empowering all who seek authentic, natural, and ageless beauty. 

We are seeking a Senior Frontend Engineer to take a lead role in shaping the next generation of our global e-commerce experience. You'll be key in our migration to BigCommerce's Catalyst framework and responsible for front-end performance. 

You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to create elegant, performant, and maintainable front-end solutions for our luxury skincare brand. 

Employment Status: Contract (3 months, with possibility to extend)  

Duties and Responsibilities Include: 

• Lead front-end build/migration of pages/components from Stencil to Catalyst (or headless alternative) using the architecture defined by our SI vendor. 

• Implement a high-performance front-end layer: ensure site speed, Lighthouse metrics, core web vitals improvements. 

• Collaborate with the internal and external cross-functional team of Product, Engineering, and QA, to ensure smooth integration with backend, APIs, and Makeswift configuration. 

• Build reusable component libraries, UI patterns and page templates aligned to our design system and brand.  

• Ensure development best practices: code quality, reviews, performance optimisation, accessibility. 

• Work in Agile/Scrum environment; deliver sprints of new pages/features, monitor and fix performance regression. 

• Provide mentoring and knowledge transfer to any new internal full-stack engineers to ramp them up on Catalyst/Makeswift environment.  

• Coordinate with QA automation to ensure test coverage for front-end and cross-browser/device performance. 

• Help define monitoring / instrumentation for front-end performance (e.g., real-user metrics, analytics hooks) and support integration with backend performance analytics. 
  
  

• Strong front-end engineering background (≥ 6-10 yrs) in React, TypeScript, modern CSS/Sass, responsive design and performance optimisation. 

• Proven experience in a headless e-commerce or large CMS/makeswift-type architecture, ideally with migration from monolithic or older front-end frameworks (e.g., Stencil) to headless/use of an API-first approach. 

• Experience with the BigCommerce Catalyst architecture (or headless BigCommerce) or similar (e.g., Contentful, Shopify Hydrogen, Next.js) is a significant plus. 

• Demonstrated record of improving web performance (Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse scores, page-load, TTI, etc). 

• Comfortable collaborating in multi-vendor and large team environments; can pick up existing codebase quickly and lead build with limited ramp-up. 

• Excellent problem-solving, clear communication, ability to mentor others. 

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, front-end performance tooling (WebPageTest, Lighthouse CI, etc), browser profiling, bundler optimisation.  

• Bonus: experience working in e-commerce (luxury/retail) environment, understanding of BigCommerce ecosystem and Stencil limitations. 

Desirable Attributes 

• Self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity (legacy Stencil context, integration issues). 

• Pragmatic trade-off mindset (speed vs. perfection) given urgency. 

• Able to document and articulate decisions, support hand-over to internal team. 

• Experience in international/EMEA deployments helpful as you'll be working globally.