Principal Tech Team Lead

Who you are

• Proven experience leading multiple teams or managers
• Experience building and scaling React applications (ideally with TypeScript)
• Strong understanding of front end architecture and modern web fundamentals (performance, browser constraints, and build tooling)
• Experience setting direction for testing strategy across the frontend (unit/component/e2e)
• Excellent coaching and mentoring skills; ability to develop strong leaders
• Experience scaling engineering teams from 5 to 50 engineers is a plus
• Strong communication and influence skills, with a servant-leadership mindset
• We believe that people from diverse backgrounds, with different identities and experiences make our company and product better. No matter your background, we'd love to hear from you!

What the job involves

• Principals can act as technical stewards, ensuring consistency across squads and enforcing architectural guidelines. They should guide and coach, not act as another command-and-control layer
• Reports to: VP of Engineering
• Direct reports: 3–5 Frontend Tech Team Leads
• As a Principal Team Lead (Front End), you will play a critical role in scaling our engineering organisation
• You’ll lead and mentor a group of Tech Team Leads, ensuring technical alignment across teams and driving best practices for frontend architecture, accessibility, reliability, and performance
• This is a hybrid role that combines technical leadership, organisational strategy, and people management
• You’ll work closely with the VP of Engineering and Staff Engineers to shape our technical vision, enforce architectural standards, and develop future leaders in the organisation
• You will set direction for our frontend platform and user experience, with a strong emphasis on React and modern frontend technologies, ensuring we can move quickly while maintaining a high bar for quality, consistency, and maintainability
• Manage and grow 3–5 Tech Team Leads, providing coaching on their leadership, delivery, and technical excellence
• Support career development plans and performance reviews for the Tech Team Leads and their direct reports
• Promote and exemplify the Xelix Culture Behaviours (Be Productive, Be Proactive, Keep Improving and Be Collaborative)
• Assist with defining team structures, e.g. squad formation, and defining ways of working for teams
• Define and maintain frontend architecture standards (React + TypeScript), ensuring consistency across squads
• Set conventions for component architecture, routing, state management, and data-fetching patterns
• Support the design system and shared component library direction, including governance and adoption
• Drive front end performance strategy and ensure teams have the tooling to measure and improve it
• Establish frontend observability best practices (error monitoring, user-impact visibility, and actionable dashboards)
• Stay hands-on by reviewing key code, participating in design sessions, and providing technical guidance
• Contribute to the codebase (Approx 30% of your time)
• Introduce tools and techniques to help the tech team go faster
• Ensure your teams are delivering code every day
• Define and champion the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process
• Act as a quality guardian through code reviews, incident management and developer training
• Promote the use of AI by the engineering team
• Act as a trusted liaison between Senior Leadership and Tech Leads, balancing strategic priorities with team realities
• Facilitate collaboration across squads for shared services and platform initiatives

Benefits

• 27 days of annual leave (including 3 days Christmas closing), with the option to roll over 3 days
• Hybrid working from our dog-friendly Hoxton office
• Comprehensive private medical & dental cover with Vitality
• Enhanced parental leave
• Learning & development culture – £500 personal annual budget
• We’re carbon-neutral and are working towards ambitious carbon reduction goals
• Lots of team socials & activities
• Annual team retreat
• On-site Gym