Mobile-First Frontend Engineer in London

We're looking for a Mobile-First Frontend Engineer who wants to own, not execute — and build something that genuinely matters to people. If you are excited about independence, impact, and contributing to the wellbeing of employees read on to learn more.

About the role

What you’ll work on:

• Take ownership of our mobile-first front-end architecture — you’ll be our first dedicated front-end hire, setting patterns, raising the bar, and defining how we build across React Native and React.
• Design, build, and deploy everything our team, our clients, and their users see — from our React Native mobile application to our React web portals and marketing site.
• Ship reliable code with strong emphasis on usability, security, and observability.
• Push back on product decisions when the technical tradeoffs aren't understood — and be right often enough that the team listens.
• Make build/buy and now/later decisions about a rapidly evolving codebase. Clearly communicate trade-offs and own the consequences.
• Experiment with and deploy specialised AI agents.
• Participate in planning based on customer feedback and engage in effective code reviews.

This is not a feature factory role — engineers at Aslan drive product decisions and own systems end-to-end: design, build, ship, observe, and iterate.

Our stack today:

• Frontend: React-native, React.
• AI: Claude Code, Lovable, ChatGPT — we experiment endlessly and expect you to as well.

Here are some thoughts on who would be successful in the role:

• Low ego, high standards: You've been wrong before, said so clearly, and moved on. You make the people around you better and leave things in better shape than you found them. The undefined parts of this role excite you more than the defined ones.
• Output over optics: You care about what ships and what works, not what looks good in a standup. No task is beneath you if it unblocks a colleague or serves a user.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: You arrive with a point of view and defend it clearly. But when better information or a better argument comes along, you update without ego. The best idea wins, regardless of who had it.
• Product ownership: You ask "who is the user, what's the job-to-be-done, what's the smallest useful thing we can ship?" You don't wait for perfect specs — you create solutions, communicate tradeoffs, and ship.
• Systems thinking: You notice second-order effects and design for the messy reality — knowing when to move fast and when to slow down.
• Collaboration: You're direct, proactive, and low ego. You give and receive feedback as a gift. No bug is too small if an outcome or colleague depends on it.

One thing this role is not:

If you want a well-defined backlog, clear separation between product and engineering, and a large team to absorb uncertainty, this probably isn't the right fit. If that description sounds limiting rather than comfortable, read on.

Early stage:

You have worked in a small & unstructured environment before (ideally a pre-Series C company or a new initiative with high risk in a bigger company). In practice, this means being comfortable in uncertainty and de-tangling complex customer problems and prioritising features to deliver customer value.

Years of experience:

5 or more. We’re looking for professionals who can structure their own work and be a strong technical voice for the team while getting their hands dirty.

Industry:

Prior experience in fintech is a huge plus.

Technical bar:

• React Native & React: You've shipped production mobile and web applications, not just prototypes. You understand the tradeoffs between the two, make smart decisions about shared code, and have strong opinions about state management, performance, and component architecture.
• TypeScript-first: You write TypeScript naturally, not as an afterthought. You use the type system to prevent bugs, not just satisfy the compiler.
• The integration layer: You're comfortable owning the boundary between front-end and back-end — RESTful APIs, async patterns, event-driven architectures. You know how to build resilient clients against imperfect services.
• Reliability & observability: You've been paged at 2am. You know what good looks like for error handling, logging, and monitoring in a mobile context. You've shipped to the App Store and Play Store and understand what that lifecycle actually involves.
• AI-native development: You use AI tools as a genuine multiplier on your output — not occasionally, but as a core part of how you build and think.
• Fintech context (strong plus): You've worked near payments, ledgers, card processing, or payroll systems. You understand why correctness matters more than speed in this domain and have felt the consequences when it doesn't.

About Aslan:

Financial wellbeing starts with your job, not your bank. Aslan is a Fintech startup on a mission to revolutionise employee compensation and reward. Aslan is fundamentally changing how people interact with their pay - giving them more of it, with control, freedom and security, seamlessly from payroll. Aslan’s highly engaging product suite covers tax-free rewards, flexible pay options, payroll-embedded savings and budgeting tools. And engage we do… employees use our app and card 30x a month, on average!