Front-End Engineer Job Kitchener area,Waterloo Ontario Canada,Software Development

Location: Waterloo

Do you want to be part of a team that redefines how we get work done? We are changing the way we develop, and we want you to be part of it! We are growing, with the mandate to power world-class customer and employee experience through software and engineering skills.

The customer is at the focus of everything we do, and tens of thousands of end users rely on our products daily. We believe in the value of empowering engineers with resources to solve critical problems for the future of the business, which is why we need you.

Front-End Foundations is the enablement team behind our internal React component library that implements Manulife's design system. It powers 100+ active digital properties across our Canadian and US segments, is endorsed at the enterprise architecture level as our standard for React development and has an active engineering community of over 1,000 people. We solve common front-end problems once, then make those solutions available to every product team.

We are seeking a self-motivated Front-End Engineer to help build the components, tooling, documentation, and AI capabilities that thousands of Manulife engineers depend on daily. This is a product engineering role: the library is the product, and developers are the customers.

Position Responsibilities:

Build the libraries: Design, build, and maintain accessible, well-tested React components, design tokens, and tooling that align to and support the enterprise design system.

Own accessibility: Strive to achieve WCAG 2.2 AA level. Implement ARIA authoring practices, keyboard interaction, and assistive technology support so that every consuming team inherits compliance by default.

Design APIs that last: Shape component APIs used by hundreds of applications. Think in terms of backwards compatibility, semantic versioning, deprecation paths, and migration guidance — not just the next release.

Enable adoption: Extend our Next.js documentation platform, live code sandbox, examples, and Figma Code Connect integration so teams can learn, adopt, and stay current with minimal friction.

Advance AI-native tooling: Contribute to our MCP server, Copilot agent skills, LLM-friendly documentation endpoints, and generative UI guardrails so AI agents produce accessible, on-brand interfaces that stay inside our design system rather than around it.

Think beyond React: Help evolve a shared headless component core so component logic is built once and shipped across web, mobile, and future platforms.

Support the community: Triage issues, review external contributions, and unblock delivery teams. Our support channel is one of the largest active engineering communities in the company.

Collaborate with designers, architects, and product teams: Partner across disciplines in an agile delivery model to identify pain points and accelerate delivery of new business value.

Required Qualifications:

5 or more years building production front-end applications or shared libraries, ideally in complex enterprise environments

Deep hands-on expertise in React and Type Script , plus modern CSS

Practical accessibility experience: semantic HTML, ARIA, focus and keyboard management, and testing with assistive technology

Experience building reusable libraries, design systems, or shared platforms consumed by other engineers
, with genuine empathy for developer experience

Testing discipline across unit, integration, visual regression, and automated accessibility checks

Familiarity with monorepos, CI/CD, release automation, and semantic versioning

movement to change the engineering culture of an enterprise

Strong verbal and written communication, with the ability to articulate technical vision, trade-offs, and outcomes to both engineers and leadership

Familiarity with agile and Dev Ops…