Frontend Architect (human)

We are looking for a Frontend Architect to own the technical and business direction of our frontend ecosystem. This is a high-impact leadership role that sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and management. You will not only make the key technical decisions that shape our frontend platform, but also weigh business trade-offs to ensure every architectural choice delivers the highest possible impact.

You will act as the bridge between business vision and engineering execution — translating requirements from management and product stakeholders into clear, actionable technical direction, and guiding the development team toward it.

Architecture & technical leadership

• Own the architecture of the entire frontend ecosystem: applications, shared libraries, design systems, build tooling, and deployment pipelines.

• Define and evolve frontend standards, patterns, and best practices (component architecture, state management, testing strategy, performance budgets, accessibility).

• Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and tools with a clear rationale balancing innovation, maintainability, and total cost of ownership.

• Understand the backend ecosystem and its defined contracts (APIs, data models, event streams) deeply enough to design the right frontend solution for each scenario — and to push back on contracts when they don't serve the product.

• Lead architectural reviews, proof-of-concepts, and technical spikes for complex initiatives.

Business & product alignment

• Work and collaborate closely with product owners and other stakeholders to define and align priorities across the frontend ecosystem.

• Translate business vision and requirements into well-defined technical requirements, roadmaps, and system designs.

• Make build-vs-buy and prioritization decisions with business impact, time-to-market, and long-term maintainability in mind.

• Understand management's priorities and set product and platform goals accordingly; communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders in clear business terms.

• Identify technical risks and opportunities early and factor them into planning.

Team guidance & delivery

• Guide development teams in planning, estimation, and execution; break large initiatives into achievable milestones.

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; raise the overall engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and knowledge sharing.

• Foster a culture of quality, ownership, and pragmatic engineering.

• Collaborate closely with backend architects, UX designers, product managers, and DevOps to ensure end-to-end coherence.

Experience

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including several years in technical leadership positions (Architect, Principal Engineer, Engineering Lead, or similar).

• A proven track record of designing and delivering large-scale, production-grade frontend platforms used by real customers.

• Experience owning decisions with both technical and business consequences.

Frontend expertise

• Expert-level knowledge of modern JavaScript/TypeScript and the browser platform (rendering pipeline, event loop, web APIs, security model).

• Deep hands-on experience with a major framework such as React or Vue and strong opinions on when each is appropriate; familiarity with meta-frameworks such as Next.js or Nuxt.

• Strong grasp of frontend architecture patterns: micro-frontends, module federation, monorepos (Nx, Turborepo), component-driven development, and design systems.

• State management at scale (Redux, Zustand, signals-based approaches, server-state tools like TanStack Query) and knowing when not to reach for them.

• Performance engineering: Core Web Vitals, code splitting, lazy loading, caching strategies, bundle analysis, SSR/SSG/ISR trade-offs.

• Testing strategy across the pyramid: unit (Vitest/Jest), component (Testing Library), and end-to-end (Playwright/Cypress).

• Solid understanding of 3D visualization on the web (WebGL, Three.js, WebGPU) and real-time/streaming data UIs — a core part of our human-machine interfaces.

• Accessibility (WCAG) and internationalization as first-class architectural concerns.

• Modern build and delivery tooling: Vite/Webpack/esbuild, CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging, progressive rollouts.

Backend & systems understanding

• Solid understanding of backend ecosystems: REST API design, WebSockets, WebRTC for real-time audio/video and data streaming, gRPC, and message queues/event-driven architectures.

• Ability to read, evaluate, and negotiate API contracts (e.g. OpenAPI schemas) and to design frontends resilient to backend evolution.

• Working knowledge of authentication/authorization flows (OAuth2/OIDC, SSO), caching layers, and CDN strategies.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and observability tooling (logging, tracing, RUM).

Leadership & communication

• Excellent communication skills in English (German is a plus); able to explain complex technical topics to executives and business context to engineers.

• Strong stakeholder management: comfortable presenting options, defending decisions with data, and committing to a direction.

• A pragmatic, outcome-oriented mindset — architecture as a means to business impact, not an end in itself.

Nice to have

• Experience in robotics, industrial automation, IoT, or other hardware-adjacent domains.

• Contributions to open-source projects, technical writing, or conference talks.

• Experience scaling frontend teams and platforms through rapid company growth.