Lead Frontend Engineer — React & Next.js

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Frontend Engineer who will set the technical direction for our consumer-facing products and mentor a team of four engineers. Our platform serves over three hundred thousand active users across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and the frontend experience you build will be the face of our brand for every one of them. In this role you will own the frontend architecture across our customer web app, employer dashboard, and internal tooling suite. You will make foundational decisions about component design systems, state management patterns, performance budgets, and accessibility standards. You believe that a great user interface is not just beautiful — it is fast, inclusive, and works reliably on a 3G connection in Mombasa just as well as on fibre in Nairobi. Day to day you will split your time between hands-on engineering and technical leadership. You will write production-quality React and Next.js code, lead architectural discussions, conduct thorough code reviews, and run regular one-on-ones with your direct reports. You will collaborate closely with our UI/UX designers to translate Figma designs into pixel-perfect, accessible implementations, and you will work with backend engineers to design API contracts that make the frontend experience as smooth as possible. You have mastered React's rendering model, understand the trade-offs between server-side rendering, static generation, and client-side rendering, and you know when to use which. You are comfortable with TypeScript, have strong opinions about CSS architecture (we use Tailwind), and you obsess over Core Web Vitals. You have experience setting up frontend monitoring, error tracking, and performance profiling. Our stack is Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS v4, Zustand, React Query, Playwright for E2E testing, and Vercel for deployment. We care deeply about progressive enhancement and offline capabilities — many of our users are in areas with intermittent connectivity. This role is remote-first with quarterly in-person team weeks in Nairobi. We offer a market-leading salary, equity, medical cover, and an annual conference and learning allowance. We are building something genuinely important for Africa's digital economy and we want engineers who share that conviction.