Engineering Manager (Front-End) at Mindera, London Paddington, 6 Months, £Contract Rate (Outside IR35)

Description

We are seeking a passionate Software Engineering Manager with a strong background in modern frontend engineering, particularly React, Next.js, and TypeScript, to provide technical leadership and operate with excellence. Creative, curious, and confident, you will be an integral part of our empowered, self-managing, multi-disciplinary engineering teams -designing, building, releasing, and maintaining high-quality digital products.

You will play a key role in shaping and growing a best-in-class frontend engineering capability, establishing modern development practices and building scalable, high-performance web applications.

This is an initial 6-month contract (outside IR35) requiring 3 days per week onsite in Paddington, London.

Key Accountabilities

Team Leadership

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of frontend engineers specialising in React, Next.js, and TypeScript.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Encourage strong engineering practices such as code reviews, testing, and knowledge sharing.
• Ensure effective allocation of people, resources, and workload across projects.

Agile Delivery

• Oversee the planning, development, and delivery of modern web applications and frontend platforms aligned with product and business objectives.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, and programme teams to deliver intuitive, performant user experiences.
• Monitor project progress, dependencies, and risks, ensuring timely delivery and high-quality outcomes.

Technical Leadership

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across React and Next.js applications, helping teams build scalable and maintainable frontend architectures.
• Promote best practices including component-driven development, SSR/SSG patterns, performance optimisation, and TypeScript-first development.
• Guide engineering teams on frontend architecture, state management, API integration, and modern web performance strategies.
• Evaluate and introduce tools and frameworks that improve developer experience, product quality, and delivery efficiency.
• Work with senior engineers to shape the frontend technical roadmap, aligning it with product and commercial priorities.

Quality & Platform Ownership

• Establish and maintain high standards for code quality, performance, accessibility, and user experience.
• Ensure frontend applications meet performance, reliability, and usability standards across devices and browsers.
• Promote a DevOps mindset where teams take ownership of their applications from development through deployment and monitoring.

Skills & Experience

• Previous hands-on senior software engineer, ideally with strong experience in React, Next.js, and TypeScript.
• Proven experience building large-scale, high-performance web applications.
• Experience leading and mentoring highly skilled frontend engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of frontend architecture, component design, performance optimisation, and modern JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems.
• Experience working in Agile product-focused teams delivering user-centric digital products.
• Excellent knowledge of system design, cloud-hosted web platforms, and modern engineering practices.
• Strong advocate of DevOps principles - "you build it, you run it. "

Technology Environment

• Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Angular
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Azure, Kubernetes
• Observability: Dynatrace
• Data & Caching: SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis, Ignite
• Backend Services: Java, Spring, Spring Boot, Micronaut