Principal Software Front End Engineer

Role Overview

Principal Software Front End Engineer (Senior/Principal)

You will define and lead frontend engineering practices across the organization, serving as the technical authority for frontend architecture, engineering excellence, and developer experience.

What You’ll Do

• Set and drive the strategic direction for frontend engineering practices, tooling, and skill development organization-wide.
• Lead delivery of accessible, performant, user-centered web applications for government customers.
• Own frontend architecture and lead engineering excellence initiatives.
• Design and implement modern frontend architectures, development pipelines, and deployment infrastructure.
• Deliver customer-facing features with a strong focus on UX and accessibility compliance (Section 508, WCAG).
• Partner with product managers to balance UI/UX goals with implementation effort and make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Build and maintain component libraries and design systems plus shared frontend infrastructure to improve velocity and consistency.
• Identify and drive modernization of the frontend stack to improve developer experience and application quality.
• Establish and champion frontend best practices:
  • mobile-first development
  • testing strategies
  • performance optimization
  • accessibility standards
  • code quality patterns
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels; help establish career development pathways for frontend specialization.
• Influence technical decisions across teams as a strategic advisor.
• Work end-to-end when needed; backend experience is valuable, but frontend is the primary focus.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven track record leading delivery of production-ready, accessible frontend applications.
• Experience architecting and implementing modern frontend applications at scale using React and/or Angular.
• Ability to establish frontend engineering standards, practices, and tooling that improve productivity and code quality.
• Hands-on experience with frontend build tooling, bundling, and deployment pipelines (e.g., Webpack, Vite, pnpm, npm).
• Strong knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA / Section 508) and practical implementation:
  • accessibility linting (e.g., axe-core, eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y)
  • automated accessibility testing in CI/CD
• Automated frontend testing experience, including:
  • unit/component testing
  • end-to-end UI testing (e.g., Playwright or Cypress)
• Familiarity with frontend infrastructure and delivery patterns (e.g., CDN strategies, asset optimization, progressive enhancement).
• Experience with design systems and maintaining consistency across multiple applications.

Technical Excellence Requirements

• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and deep understanding of web platform APIs.
• Strong CSS architecture skills, mobile-first responsive design, and cross-browser compatibility.
• Knowledge of automated testing strategies including:
  • Jest/Vitest
  • React Testing Library / Angular Testing Library
  • Playwright
• Experience integrating accessibility validation into testing pipelines using axe-core (or similar).
• State management patterns and asynchronous data handling in frontend apps.
• Web performance optimization including Core Web Vitals and frontend monitoring.
• Understanding of API integration patterns.

Requirements

• 5+ years of related experience.
• US citizenship required.