Associate Director, Frontend Engineering

Whereoware, Inc

1d•Remote

About The Position

Leading digital experience agency for 20+ years, Whereoware drives smart growth through digital strategy and activation. We specialize in successfully guiding brands through the ever-changing digital landscape — customer acquisition, retention, and maximization; marketing optimization; and e-commerce solutions. Pioneering online personalization and holistic digital experiences, we design and build award-winning websites and campaigns, generating impactful results with data integrations, analytics, and digital advertising. Whereoware acquired a user experience consultancy in 2022, accelerating our growth and advancing our capabilities to help our clients achieve their goals. Whereoware is hiring an Associate Director, Frontend Engineering to lead and grow our frontend practice. You'll start by building a small, high-performing team of frontend engineers — hiring, mentoring, and establishing the standards that define how we build digital experiences. You'll also serve as a technical leader in client-facing engagements, guiding architectural conversations during discovery and delivery around CMS, e-commerce, and composable digital experience platforms. You're equal parts strategist and practitioner. You can whiteboard a headless commerce architecture with a client's technical team in the morning and review a pull request in the afternoon. You're opinionated about frontend craft but pragmatic about delivery. You lead with humility, invest in your people, and advocate for great user experiences — because that's everyone's job, not just the designer's.

Requirements

8+ years of frontend development experience, with at least 2 years in a leadership or team-lead capacity (managing engineers, not just mentoring).
Deep expertise in React, Next.js, and TypeScript — you've built and shipped production applications, not just prototypes.
Architectural fluency across the modern frontend stack — server-side rendering (SSR/ISR), static generation, edge rendering, and deployment to platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or Azure.
Hands-on experience with headless CMS platforms — specifically Optimizely CMS, Contentstack, and/or Contentful. And Familiarity with Drupal or WordPress.
E-commerce platform experience — ideally with Shopify Plus and/or BigCommerce in a headless or composable context. You understand cart flows, checkout customization, product data modeling, and catalog integration patterns.
Experience with frontend testing strategies and tooling — including frameworks like Playwright, Vitest, or Cypress. You don't just write tests; you can define a testing strategy for a team, establish coverage expectations, and integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
Strong understanding of performance optimization (Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse), accessibility (WCAG/a11y), and SEO as first-class concerns, not afterthoughts.
Comfortable working with REST and GraphQL APIs, and able to evaluate integration approaches with backend services and third-party platforms.
Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows — you've incorporated tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar AI coding assistants into your workflow and can form a perspective on how AI accelerates frontend delivery without sacrificing code quality. Experience evaluating or integrating AI-powered features into digital experiences (chatbots, personalization, content generation) is a plus.
Client-facing communication skills — you can translate technical architecture into business value for non-technical stakeholders and hold your own in a room with a client's CTO.
Experience building or scaling a team — hiring, onboarding, establishing processes, and creating career growth paths.

Nice To Haves

Bonus: experience with design systems tooling (Storybook), composable/MACH architecture patterns, or contributions to open-source frontend projects.

Responsibilities

Build and lead a frontend engineering team — recruit, hire, and develop frontend engineers from the ground up, establishing a culture of quality, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Drive technical strategy in client engagements — lead architectural discussions during discovery and delivery, advising clients on CMS, e-commerce, and frontend platform decisions that align with their business goals.
Define frontend architecture and standards — own the technical direction for frontend delivery across projects, including framework selection, design system strategy, component library governance, and integration patterns with headless CMS and commerce platforms.
Collaborate cross-functionally — work closely with UX designers, backend engineers, strategists, and project managers to deliver cohesive, high-quality digital experiences.
Stay hands-on where it counts — contribute to codebases on complex or high-stakes deliverables, particularly around performance, accessibility, and platform integration.
Champion engineering excellence — establish code review practices, testing strategies, CI/CD standards, and documentation norms for the frontend team.
Contribute to business development — support sales and strategy teams with technical expertise during proposals, estimates, and client presentations.