Principal React Engineer

Location: London, United Kingdom

Industry: Financial Services

Salary: £130,000

Overview

We are seeking a Principal React Engineer to lead the design and delivery of high-quality web applications within a regulated financial services environment. You will set technical direction, raise engineering standards, and collaborate closely with Product, Design, Security, and Platform teams to deliver performant, accessible and resilient customer-facing experiences.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architecture decisions for complex React applications and shared front-end platforms.
• Develop and maintain scalable UI systems using React, TypeScript and modern tooling.
• Champion performance optimisation (Core Web Vitals), accessibility (WCAG) and security best practice.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards: code quality, testing strategy, review practices, and documentation.
• Mentor engineers, support career development, and provide technical leadership across squads.
• Collaborate on API contracts with back-end teams and ensure robust integration patterns.
• Drive observability and operational excellence using monitoring, logging, and error tracking.
• Contribute to delivery planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication.

Required Skills & Experience

• Extensive experience building production-grade React applications in complex domains.
• Expert TypeScript knowledge and strong JavaScript fundamentals.
• Deep understanding of modern front-end architecture (component patterns, state management, routing, micro-frontends where appropriate).
• Strong testing discipline: unit, integration and end-to-end testing (for example Jest, React Testing Library, Cypress/Playwright).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, version control, and trunk-based development or similar workflows.
• Strong knowledge of web security (OWASP), secure authentication/authorisation patterns, and handling sensitive data.
• Proven track record of improving performance, reliability, and maintainability at scale.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across teams.

Desirable

• Experience in financial services, payments, lending, trading, or other regulated environments.
• Design system development and adoption, including accessibility-first component libraries.
• Experience with Node.js, GraphQL, or API gateway patterns.
• Cloud and container familiarity (for example AWS, Docker, Kubernetes) and monitoring tools.

Working Style

• Pragmatic leadership, balancing delivery with long-term engineering health.
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and guiding teams to clear technical outcomes.
• Commitment to inclusive, collaborative ways of working.