Lead Front End Developer in Swindon

Oak Furnitureland is a beloved British furniture retailer with a passion for helping people create their dream homes. We are committed to exceptional quality and stylish furniture at accessible prices. As we continue to grow and evolve, we are seeking a talented Lead Developer to advance our ecommerce experience and supporting services.

The Lead Front End Developer will develop, maintain, and improve software to support the company’s needs and objectives in accordance with company processes and best coding practices. With a focus on e‑commerce projects and customer‑facing features, the role includes managing a front‑end development team of six and supporting peers with technical implementation and skills development. You will be a strong communicator, make decisive decisions to guide teams, influence stakeholders, and keep projects moving effectively. Collaboration will occur closely with product, design, QA, and IT operations to deliver measurable value that aligns with business goals, prioritising performance, accessibility, reliability, and secure engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide inspirational leadership, training, and coaching to promote collaboration and engagement.
• Manage operational KPIs that drive continuous improvement.
• Invest in direct reports, ensuring alignment with technical strategy and accountability against project milestones.
• Plan resources across development teams to support delivery of the technical strategy.
• Recruit, orient, and day‑to‑day manage team members.
• Guide project priority and technical direction.

Software Development

• Write well‑structured and maintainable code that meets project objectives within a suitable time frame.
• Proactively complete projects while meeting all deadlines.
• Follow coding guidelines and keep up to date with coding standards.
• Perform self code reviews using branch diffs before creating pull requests.
• Consider performance implications of changes and improve application performance where possible.
• Ensure usability and UI intuitiveness to minimise training and support.
• Make frequent commits and push to the remote server to prevent data loss.
• Write descriptive and atomic commit messages.

Software Testing

• Ensure all software changes are thoroughly tested before release.
• Cover realistic use cases and affected parts of the system regardless of change scale.
• Test against multiple devices and browsers, focusing on the most common types and versions.
• Update, maintain, or create automated tests to reliably check new code changes.
• Run the automated test suite locally before tickets enter the change request.
• Evaluate coding and testing mistakes that could impact business operations or revenue.

Skills and Experience

• Previous experience managing a team is essential.
• Excellent leadership skills, identifying goals and motivating others.
• Strong communicator with the ability to influence decisions.
• Commercial software developer experience in designing, building, and deploying high‑volume production web applications with responsive design.
• Proficiency in modern front‑end development: semantic HTML5, reusable SCSS‑based CSS.
• Expert‑level JavaScript (ES6+) programming, including modern frameworks and modular components.
• Experience integrating front‑end code with a backend server‑side language; Object‑Oriented PHP experience is essential.
• Knowledge of performance optimisation, web accessibility, and SEO best practices.
• Ability to consume and integrate external services and APIs using libraries and SDKs.
• Strong Git workflow knowledge including conflict resolution and code review processes.
• Experience with automated testing tools such as Cucumber or Selenium.
• Proficient in CLI for dependency management, server navigation, and build processes.

Desirable Technologies

• Module bundlers (Webpack)
• Modern CSS frameworks
• Templating engines (Twig)
• JavaScript frameworks (Vue, jQuery)
• Developer tools (Algolia, Jira, Bitbucket)
• Analytics mindset to use data for technical decisions and measure outcomes.
• Experience in retail, e‑commerce, or content‑rich websites.

Benefits

• Employee discount: amazing discounts on all Oak Furnitureland products after successful completion of probation.
• Life assurance: free cover of a minimum of two times your annual salary up to age 65.
• Holiday: 25 days per year plus bank holidays.
• Birthday: an extra day off to celebrate your birthday.
• Hybrid working: minimum of one day per week in the office.
• Pension: 4% employee contribution matched by the company.
• Employee Assistance Programme: access to telephone and face‑to‑face counselling services.
• My Rewards Programme: discounts on restaurants, supermarkets, entertainment, and holidays.
• Free on‑site parking.

All employees are protected by the UK Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion policy.