Principal Frontend Engineer

About Temple & Webster Temple & Webster is Australia’s leading online retailer of furniture and homewares. Our mission is to make the world more beautiful, one room at a time. We apply this same vision to our employee experience, ensuring our workplace is as inspiring, thoughtful, and high-impact as the homes we help our customers create. About the Team & the Role As Principal Frontend Engineer, you will sit at the top of our individual-contributor track to shape our technical direction while remaining deeply hands-on in the codebase. You will provide hands-on technical leadership to help shape the next generation of our greenfield Next.js e-commerce storefront. Acting as the technical authority across squads, you'll define our frontend architecture, engineering standards, and co-own the technical roadmap for the storefront. In this role, you will also help pioneer AI-native software engineering in practice - exploring agentic development workflows across the engineering lifecycle to meaningfully lift velocity, code quality, and maintainability. What You’ll Do Technical Leadership & Ownership: Act as the primary escalation point for complex frontend challenges and take ownership of the frontend architecture, patterns, and long-term technical health.Architecture & Performance: Co-own the storefront roadmap, balancing rapid iteration for e-commerce experimentation with Next.js platform performance (SSR, SSG, ISR, App Router, Core Web Vitals).AI & Agentic Innovation: Drive adoption of agentic and AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) responsibly across engineering workflows.Quality & Standards: Establish and enforce best practice CI/CD pipelines (GitLab), testing disciplines (unit, integration, E2E), linting, and WCAG accessibility standards.Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers to raise the bar on code quality, while clearly communicating architectural trade-offs to both technical and commercial stakeholders. What You Already Have Deep React/Next.js Expertise: Proven experience architecting and building complex Next.js/React applications at scale in high-traffic e-commerce environments.Advanced Tech Stack Skills: Expert-level TypeScript/JavaScript (Server Components, advanced React patterns), Tailwind CSS, and experience integrating headless CMS/microservice APIs.Performance & Observability Focus: Strong command of web performance optimisation and experience using monitoring tools like DataDog or Sentry to diagnose issues at scale.AI-Assisted Workflows: Hands-on experience with agentic development tools and a clear vision for integrating AI into modern engineering workflows.Commercial & Data-Driven Mindset: Understanding of how client-facing technical decisions impact conversion, site speed, and overall customer experience. What’s in It for You Drive high-impact architectural decisions on a greenfield e-commerce platform using modern Next.js stack and server components.Pioneer AI-native development practices in a top-tier Australian e-commerce engineering org. Benefits & Culture Embracing Culture: Be part of an inclusive, warm, and high-energy culture where our values drive how we work.Exclusive Discounts: Enjoy generous employee discounts across our entire furniture and homewares range.Hybrid Work: Flexible working arrangements balancing work-from-home with time at our St Peters HQ.Lunch On Us: Catered lunches three days a week and subsidised coffee with our in-house barista.Celebrate You: Enjoy paid leave on your birthday!Family-Friendly: Access to paid parental leave to support you through significant life events.Mindful Moments: Daily mindfulness practices in our dedicated wellness room.Social & Community: Celebrate with regular events organised by our Ministry of Fun, or give back through volunteer leave with our charity partners.