Principal Front End Engineer; React - Remote

Overview

At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer-driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience—from e-bike and electric vehicle servicing to on-demand solutions. Halfords is expanding into digital services with Avayler, a standalone SaaS division delivering a market-leading garage management and mobile van software platform.

Avayler enables businesses to deliver complex services via an end-to-end digital solution and to scale globally.

This is a remote position that may involve occasional travel.

As Principal Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping the future of our frontend platform and the way our engineering teams build, scale, and deliver products globally. Working closely with the Head of Engineering, you’ll bring deep React expertise to the most complex challenges in the business, helping teams move faster while raising the bar on quality, performance, and maintainability.

You’ll be a trusted technical authority, influencing architectural decisions and setting standards that enable consistent, high-quality delivery.

This is a hands-on role, balancing strategic thinking with real-world problem solving. You’ll design and build new features, tackle core frontend challenges, and explore emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development to improve how we work. Through mentoring, guilds, and knowledge sharing, you’ll elevate frontend capability across the organisation, promoting best practice in React, Type Script, testing, accessibility, and performance. Your focus will always be on building for the future: scalable architectures, reusable components, and tooling that allows teams to deliver efficiently at scale.

We’re moving from a startup environment into a more mature, scalable phase, and this role is central to that transition. You’ll help optimise our frontend platform and development practices so we can grow without adding unnecessary complexity or headcount. If you’re a React expert who enjoys solving hard problems, influencing how great software is built, and creating a stable foundation for long-term growth, this role gives you the autonomy, impact, and technical depth to do exactly that.

This is a remote position that may involve occasional travel

• Act as the technical authority for our React frontend, setting standards and best practice across architecture, performance, accessibility, and testing.
• Work closely with the Head of Engineering to shape the frontend roadmap and focus effort where it delivers the most value.
• Design and build scalable, maintainable frontend solutions, balancing long-term architecture with pragmatic delivery.
• Lead the development of complex features and resolve high-impact issues across the frontend stack.
• Champion modern React patterns, tooling, and frameworks, staying ahead of industry trends and applying them pragmatically.
• Establish and evolve component libraries, design systems, and frontend architectural patterns.
• Mentor and support frontend engineers through coaching, code reviews, and technical leadership.
• Run and contribute to frontend guilds and communities of practice to share knowledge and upskill teams.
• Promote and embed the effective use of AI-assisted development tools to improve speed, quality, and developer experience.
• Drive quality through strong ownership of testing strategies, performance optimisation, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Backend teams to deliver high-quality user experiences end to end.
• Support the evolution of build pipelines, deployment practices, and frontend infrastructure to enable smooth, reliable delivery.

• Proven expert in React with deep experience building and scaling complex, production-grade frontend applications.
• Strong background in modern frontend architecture, including component libraries, design systems, and performance optimisation.
• Confident working with modern JavaScript frameworks, and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Demons…