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 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. We are looking for a strong communicator, with good decision‑making skills to guide teams, influence stakeholders and keep projects moving effectively. You will collaborate closely with our product, design, QA, and IT operations to deliver measurable value that aligns with business goals, prioritising performance, accessibility, reliability, and secure engineering practices. The role is based in our Swindon head office and we can offer hybrid working with a minimum of 1 day a week in the office.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership: Through inspirational leadership, training, and coaching, promote collaboration and engagement, empowering through technical ownership whilst reducing key man risk by removing knowledge silos. Support a management framework inclusive of measurable operational KPIs that promote a cycle of continuous improvement. Invest in direct reports, ensuring alignment with technical strategy and holding development teams to account against agreed project milestones. Help plan resources across all development teams with the capability to support delivery of technical strategy. Recruitment, induction plans and onboarding and day to day management of team members. Provide guidance on project priority and technical direction.
• Software Development: Write well‑structured and maintainable code that meets project objectives within a suitable time frame. Use initiative to complete projects in a proactive way whilst delivering them within any required deadlines. Follow the coding guidelines and keep up to date with the coding standards. Perform a self code review using the branch diff, prior to creating a pull request to catch any obvious mistakes or coding violations. Consider the performance implications of any changes that are made. Improve application performance where possible within a reasonable timeframe. Consider the usability and UI of features created. Make them intuitive and easy to understand, minimising training and support required. Make regular commits and push to the remote server. Multiple commits and pushes each day are expected, preventing data loss and allowing the flexibility to switch developers at short notice. Write descriptive and atomic commit messages.
• Software Testing: Ensure all software changes are well tested. Test all code changes thoroughly ahead of sending a ticket to QA. Cover realistic use cases and affected parts of the system regardless of the scale of the change. Test changes against multiple devices and browsers with a focus on the most common types and versions our customers use. Update any affected automated tests to reliably check and account for new code changes and functionality. Create new automated tests where required. Run the automated test suite locally ahead of putting a ticket into CR. Evaluating how coding and testing mistakes can have a big impact on the business in terms of disrupted operation and potential loss of revenue.

Skills And Experience

• Previous experience managing a team is essential.
• Excellent leadership skills, identifying goals and objectives and motivating and leading others towards their achievements.
• A confident communicator with the ability to lead and influence decisions.
• Previous commercial experience as a Software Developer, designing, building, and deploying high‑volume production web applications with a focus on responsive design and cross‑browser compatibility.
• Strong proficiency in modern front‑end development, with the ability to write semantic HTML5 and optimised, reusable CSS via SCSS.
• Expert‑level JavaScript (ES6+) programming skills, including experience with modern frameworks and developing modular, reusable components for rich interactive content.
• Ability to integrate front‑end code with a backend server side language to dynamically render and manage application pages.
• Object‑Oriented PHP experience is essential.
• Practical knowledge of performance optimisation, web accessibility guidelines, and SEO best practice.
• Proven ability to consume and integrate various external services and APIs using libraries and SDKs to deliver rich functionality.
• Strong working knowledge of Git for version control, including conflict resolution, code review processes, and utilising Feature Branching.
• Experience with writing and executing automated tests using tools like Cucumber or Selenium.
• Proficient in utilising the Command Line Interface (CLI) to manage dependencies, navigate server environments, and execute application build processes.
• Experience with the following technologies is desirable: Module Bundlers (Webpack), modern CSS Frameworks, Templating Engines (Twig), JavaScript Frameworks (Vue, jQuery), and Developer Tools (Algolia, Jira, Bitbucket).
• Analytical mindset with the ability to use data to inform technical decisions and measure outcomes.
• Experience in retail, ecommerce, or content rich websites is desirable.

Benefits

• Employee discount: amazing discounts available 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 the age of 65.
• 25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays.
• Birthday: an additional day off for you to celebrate your birthday.
• Hybrid working.
• Pension: 4% employee contribution matched by the company.
• Employee Assistance Programme: gives all employees access to both telephone and face‑to‑face counselling services.
• My Rewards Programme: offers discounts on everything from restaurants and supermarkets, to entertainment and holidays.
• Free on‑site parking.