Team Lead - UI Development - eCommerce

Farnell

Farnell, an Avnet company, is a global high-service distributor of technology products, services and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair.

We seek a Team Leader for our new UI Development team based in our India office. You will manage a team of senior UI developers and will be responsible for their learning, supporting them in their day-to-day work assignments, plus the team’s administration and logistics. You will report to the UI Engineering Manager. You and your team will join our wider UI development group responsible for building and maintaining our global, large-scale eCommerce platform.

This role is 50% team management and 50% technical. On the technical side you will require strong expertise in React/TypeScript, Node.js, and Apollo Client and have a focus on delivering responsive, high-performance user interfaces for a seamless customer experience. On the team management side of the role you will lead a small, but growing team of UI developers. Providing them guidance, decision support, liaison with the wider organisation, design advice and ensure HR policies are followed and that the team is effective at delivering it’s work assignments.   

Responsibilities:

• Support the developers to use React and related libraries to create highly interactive, user-friendly, and visually appealing applications.
• Ensure the developers in your team work effectively with BA’s, Product Owners, UX/UI designers, and back-end engineers to transform business requirements into technical solutions, delivering a seamless and cohesive e-commerce experience for our customers.
• Focus on optimizing the performance of each developer in your team.
• Ensure your developers understand the importance of fast UI component load times, smooth navigation, and a responsive experience across devices.
• The team needs to understand how key it is to include updating and refactoring our extensive caching solution, which is provided by Akamai at the front door, but also this mechanism relies on several layers of caching technologies deeper in the application stack.
• You will be expected to deliver code changes via implementing data fetching and state management through Apollo Client and integrate the UI with RESTful and GraphQL APIs built with Node.js and Apollo Server. Although you will be in a leadership role you will be assigned complex support issues and special projects to keep your skills up to date with the tech’s by actually using them.
• We want you to be an advocate for best practices for software development, including clean, maintainable code, automated testing, and code reviews.
• Mentor junior and mid-level developers, offering guidance on React development, front-end architecture, and best practices.
• Actively engage and freely share your experience with your team and in our Front-end Guild group. Our internal community of UI Development professionals, like yourself, who want to provide the best UI outcomes, in the most modern and up to date ways.
• Work with our UI Engineering Manager to set UI technology strategy and operational methods.
• Monitor UI system performance and code metrics and identify areas to refactor and tools to improve them.  
• Keep yourself and your team up-to-date with the latest developments in front-end technologies, especially within the React ecosystem and eCommerce trends.
   

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Proven experience in a leadership role either of other developers or as a senior guiding/mentoring technical direction and you want the challenge to step up to lead a team!  
• You will have been a Front-End or UI Developer, with hands-on React/TypeScript experience.
• You will be able to demonstrate your competency in all of these technologies and tools - ReactJS, TypeScript, Node.js, Loadable Components, Jest, Styled Components, Storybook, GraphQL and Apollo (client/server) and optionally Akamai caching (or another CDN).

To stress our key needs, we will be looking for -

• Strong understanding of React and its ecosystem.
• Experience with Apollo Client and GraphQL queries, mutation handling, and state management.
• Solid knowledge of Node.js and how to integrate the front-end with back-end services.
• Expertise in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript (ES6+).
• Experience with responsive design
• Experience with Gitlab and their GitFlow version control process and ideally you have been involved in implementing code control methods.
• Ability to collaborate with UX/UI designers and translate Figma and Storybook prototypes into functional, high-quality user interfaces.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, focusing on user-centric solutions.
• Familiarity with front-end testing frameworks (Jest in particular). We also do A/B testing via Adobe Target.
• Proficient in optimizing UI performance for large-scale applications, with experience implementing lazy loading, code splitting, and other advanced optimization techniques.
• Explain the importance of code reviews, unit testing and strong code management.
• Familiarity with the challenges of building and scaling eCommerce platforms is a plus.
• Previous experience in an Agile/Scrum development environment.
• Development experience with Headless CMS’s solutions like Bloomreach would be beneficial.

Soft Skills:

• You will be able to articulate what motivates developers and how to translate that into leadership actions to build an effective team.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to work in partnership and across distributed teams. We rely on frequent show and tells of working software, strong technical leadership qualities, including the ability to mentor junior developers and advocate for best practices in front-end development.
• Attention to detail with a passion for creating beautiful, functional, and user-centric designs.
• Ability to manage time and prioritize tasks effectively in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstratable experience in –
  • Being flexible, adaptable and being comfortable delegating tasks.
  • Management reporting.
• Be a problem solver in a methodical and controlled way.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. They are not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills.