Front End Developer

On behalf of DWP, we are looking for a Senior Front End Developer for a 12 Month (Inside IR35) Hybrid contract based up to 3 days per week in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds Newcastle or Blackpool.

As a Senior Front End Developer, you will be an expert in building high-quality, user-centric web applications and a role model in Front End craftsmanship. You'll lead by example, ensuring best practices in UI development, accessibility, and performance are consistently applied across the team.

You will work closely with designers, architects, and engineering teams to create responsive, accessible, and visually engaging interfaces that power citizen-facing services. Your focus will be on delivering seamless user experiences while maintaining operational stability, scalability, and maintainability.

Key Responsibilities:
. Develop and maintain modern, responsive, and accessible Front End applications using Node.js to integrate with JavaScript and frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.
. Champion best practices in HTML, CSS (including modern methodologies like BEM or CSS-in-JS), and JavaScript/TypeScript.
. Ensure cross-browser compatibility, performance optimisation, and WCAG accessibility compliance.
. Collaborate with Back End teams to integrate APIs and deliver smooth, data-driven experiences.
. Drive code quality through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
. Stay ahead of emerging Front End technologies and advocate for improvements in tooling and processes.

Summary of the Role and key responsibilities
. Design and lead strategies for building reusable UI components, design systems, and Front End libraries to ensure consistency and scalability across applications.
. Own the development of medium- to long-term strategies for Front End architecture and the Front End Engineering Community, driving adoption of modern frameworks and best practices.
. Identify and resolve Front End performance and rendering issues, ensuring smooth, responsive, and accessible user experiences.
. Provide advanced technical support for Front End products, including troubleshooting complex UI issues and occasional out-of-hours support when required.
. Contribute to and set the strategic direction for product teams and the wider Front End engineering community, ensuring alignment with design principles and accessibility standards.
. Champion collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams, promoting best practices in UI development, performance optimization, and accessibility compliance.
. Lead and support community discussions on Front End best practices, emerging technologies, and innovative approaches to building exceptional user interfaces.

Technical Skills required
. Collaborates with others when necessary to review specifications and uses these agreed standards and tools to design, code, test, correct and document programmes or scripts of medium to high complexity, using the right standards and tools.
. Understands the difference between user needs and desires of the user. Has experience in meeting user needs across a variety of channels. Able to integrate digital analytics with qualitative data, such as user surveys and user research, to develop hypotheses for testing. Can offer recommendations on the best tools and methods to be used. Able to collaborate with user researchers and can sell/represent users internally. Able to champion user research to focus on all users. Can prioritise and defines approaches to understand the user story, guiding others in doing so.
. Designs systems characterised by medium levels of risk, impact and business or technical complexity. Selects appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures they are applied effectively. Reviews the systems designs of others to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
. Defines and designs the integration build. Able to co-ordinate build activities and understands how to undertake and support integration testing activities.

Knowledge and Experience required:
. Uses modern Front End standards and approaches confidently and mentors others, promoting best practices in HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js and frameworks like Node.js, React or Angular.
. Collaborates with designers, UX specialists, and other developers to review specifications, ensuring agreed design standards and Front End tools are applied effectively. Designs, codes, tests, debugs, and documents complex Front End components and scripts using modern frameworks and best practices.
. Integrates digital analytics with qualitative insights (eg, user research, surveys) to form hypotheses for usability improvements. Recommends the best tools and methods for Front End development and testing. Champions user-centered design and collaborates with researchers to represent user needs internally. Guides others in prioritizing and defining approaches to understand user stories.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".