Lead Frontend Engineer in London

Kiplot enables large organisations to turn their strategies into reality. The project portfolio management (PPM) market is already worth $4B and growing fast. But most solutions are legacy tools, over 30 years old. Kiplot is part of a new generation of enterprise software: beautiful, interactive, easy to use, and endlessly configurable, without needing technical support or consultants. Strategic Portfolio Management sits at the intersection of strategy, finance, delivery, and resourcing. As a result, Kiplot is used by senior leaders across the business to make decisions that shape how entire organisations invest, prioritise, and execute.

We are backed by a consortium of angel investors and are already profitable. Despite being a young start-up, Kiplot's platform is already relied upon by some of the world's biggest and best-known financial services companies around the world. Joining Kiplot means working closely with global enterprises and gaining first-hand exposure to how some of the world's largest organisations actually operate, make trade-offs, and turn strategy into action.

We are looking for extremely smart, exceptionally driven engineers who are energised by hard problems, high standards, and real ownership. Kiplot is a high-trust, high-performance team where people enjoy doing difficult work well.

About the Role: We're looking for a Lead Frontend Engineer to help us build the next generation of Kiplot's platform. This is not a role maintaining a legacy codebase, polishing a finished product, or making cosmetic UI changes. Kiplot is already used by major enterprise customers, but we are still building aggressively. You'll be improving and extending product areas that are already working in production, while also leading the design and delivery of substantial new features from the ground up.

The frontend challenges at Kiplot are deep. Our users work with large, complex datasets across strategy, finance, delivery, and resourcing. They need powerful planning, modelling, reporting, workflow, and visualisation tools that remain fast, intuitive, and reliable under real enterprise complexity.

As Lead Frontend Engineer, you'll help shape how we build sophisticated product experiences: interactive views, configurable workflows, dense data interfaces, visual planning tools, and complex stateful interactions. You'll work closely with product, design, and backend engineering to turn difficult enterprise problems into software that feels clear, fast, and well-crafted.

This is a role for someone who wants more than a narrow delivery position. You should enjoy building significant product capability, making pragmatic technical decisions, setting a high bar for frontend quality, and working in a team that cares deeply about craft, speed, and user experience.

Kiplot is a data-intensive platform built to deliver real-time, dynamic experiences through an event-driven architecture. Here's what powers it:

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, D3.js, TanStack
• Node.js
• Data and Authentication: PostgreSQL, Keycloak
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker

We leverage modern web technologies to create an intuitive and responsive user experience. Built with TypeScript, we use React for component-driven development, TanStack for state management, and D3 to bring data visualisations to life with genuine wow factor. Your contributions will directly shape how users navigate complex data with ease.

Our backend combines ASP.NET Core (C#) and Node.js (TypeScript), following event-driven patterns like Event Sourcing and CQRS to manage complex workflows. PostgreSQL and Marten handle data persistence, while RabbitMQ powers our messaging layer. We maintain quality through automated testing with Jest, xUnit, and TestCafe.

Kiplot runs on AWS with Kubernetes orchestration, using Docker containers and Terraform for infrastructure as code. GitLab handles our CI/CD pipelines and source management: everything is automated, repeatable, and built to scale.

About You: You have a problem-solving mindset, high standards, and the ability to see difficult work through to completion. You enjoy working in a team of strong specialists, where collaboration is used to understand problems deeply, shape the right solution, and make good architectural decisions before moving quickly into focused execution.

You will:

• Be comfortable working closely with peers during early exploration, prototyping, and design, especially when the shape of the solution is still emerging.
• Be comfortable taking a clear plan, disappearing into focused build mode, and coming back with substantial, high-quality product capability.
• Be confident building complex frontend applications in React, owning features from concept through to delivery.
• Have experience designing and building solutions based on user requirements, not just implementing specs handed to you.
• Care deeply about clean, efficient, reusable code that other strong engineers can understand, extend, and rely on.
• Care about user experience and understand that great engineering serves real people.

We work best with people who like the full loop: understand the problem, design the approach, refine the plan, challenge the weak points, then build with pace and ownership.

Nice to have:

• Background in enterprise SaaS environments.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures or real-time systems.

We work hard to build an outcome-focused culture that welcomes different thinking styles while embracing work-life balance. We offer flexible working between home and the office: teams choose their location based on preference and customer needs.

Our office in Old Street offers breakfast, endless coffee, tea, and fruit. There's beer and pizza every Thursday, and it's pet-friendly. Our monthly socials are legendary and have included virtual clay pigeon shooting, real-life Mario Kart, escape rooms, pizza making, and company-wide trips abroad to Tenerife and Lisbon.

28 days annual holiday, early-stage equity/options, remote-first with optional office access (Old Street), private health insurance, home office setup budget, pet-friendly office.

Interview Process:

• Introductory Call: A relaxed video call to say hello. We'll talk about your background, what you're looking for, and give you a clear picture of Kiplot, the role, and what working in a startup is really like. Plenty of time for your questions.
• Technical Discussion: A collaborative pairing session where we'll work through a realistic problem together. We're not looking for perfection: we want to see how you think, communicate, and approach unfamiliar challenges. You'll also get a feel for how we work.
• Founder Chat: A quick, informal conversation with the founders to talk about ambition, expectations, and what success at Kiplot looks like. This is as much about you interviewing us.
• If we're a mutual fit, we'll move quickly. We respect your time and aim to have a decision within days, not weeks. We'll be transparent at every stage, give you space to ask questions, and share feedback promptly, regardless of outcome.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Kiplot is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status. Not sure if you meet every requirement? Studies show that some people hesitate to apply unless they meet 100% of the criteria. At Kiplot, we value potential and attitude as much as experience. If this role excites you and you think you could thrive here, we'd love to hear from you. We're building a diverse team with different perspectives and backgrounds. Apply anyway. Let's have a conversation.