Frontend Engineer, Liverpool: £40,000 to £55,000

If you believe the frontend is where software meets actual human beings, and you want to work somewhere that funds that belief properly, read on. The hard parts are included, as they are on every page of this site.

What will you actually do as a frontend engineer here?

You will own the candidate-facing experience layer of the Happydance platform within your squad. Concretely:

• Building interfaces in React and TypeScript that render across hundreds of client sites, each with its own branding, content and configuration.
• Treating accessibility as engineering: semantic structure, keyboard navigation, focus management, screen reader behaviour and colour contrast, tested and shipped to WCAG 2.2 AA on everything, every time.
• Working daily with designers inside your squad, challenging designs early when they will not survive contact with accessibility or performance budgets, rather than discovering it in review.
• Owning frontend performance on real devices and real networks, because candidates apply from mid-range phones on buses, not fibre-connected MacBooks.
• Building the component patterns other engineers reuse, which means your standards quietly become the platform's standards.

From day one, expect to be inside our component library and design system. Within a month you should be shipping candidate-facing features. Unlike the generalist mid-level role, you will not be asked to carry backend services; your depth is the point.

What will you work on?

The parts of the platform candidates touch: conversational navigation, easy-apply overlays that strip friction out of the application moment, AI-generated content surfaces, internal mobility sites, and the structured, discoverable pages that make careers sites legible to search engines and AI answer engines alike. These interfaces carry measurable weight: the platform delivers up to 50% more pageviews and up to 25% conversion improvements for clients, and frontend quality is a large share of why. The full tech stack has its own page.

What are the honest hard parts of frontend work at Happydance?

Accessibility is non-negotiable, and that has a cost. WCAG 2.2 AA on everything means some features take longer than a quick-and-dirty build would. You will sometimes unpick clever interactions because they fail with a keyboard or a screen reader. If you see that as the job done properly, good. If you would experience it as bureaucracy, this role will grind on you.

You build for configurations you cannot see. One component, hundreds of client sites, each with different branding, content lengths, languages and edge cases. "Works on my machine" is a longer sentence here.

Design collaboration is real, which means friction is real. You will push back on designs and designers will push back on your implementations, in the open, respectfully, often. People who prefer to receive finished specs and build in peace find our squads noisy.

Browser and device reality bites. Enterprise clients mean enterprise browser matrices and candidates on every device imaginable. Some weeks the hard problem is not the feature, it is making it hold together everywhere.

Who is this frontend job not for?

• Engineers who see accessibility as a checklist to clear at the end. Here it shapes decisions from the first line, and retrofitters struggle.
• Full-stack engineers who would miss the backend. This role goes deep, not wide; if you want breadth, the Software Engineer role is the truthful fit.
• Pixel-perfectionists who cannot ship until everything is ideal. We ship to a high bar on a rhythm, and the enemy of that is not low standards, it is unbounded ones.
• Anyone allergic to writing tests for UI. Interaction states, accessibility behaviours and visual regressions are tested here, not hoped about.

Why does accessibility matter this much to Happydance?

Because a careers site that some candidates cannot use is a hiring process that quietly excludes them, and our whole product thesis is that hiring should be honest and fair. That is also why the platform runs bias detection against 80 criteria on job content. Accessibility is the same conviction applied to interfaces, and it is a hard requirement from enterprise clients too, so principle and commercial reality point the same way. Engineers who develop deep accessibility craft become rarer and more valuable every year; we think that is a career asset we can help you build.

How do you apply for this frontend developer job in Liverpool?

Through this page. Send a CV plus a link to something you built, and a few sentences on the interface decision within it you sweated most. If you have accessibility work you are proud of, show it; if you have not yet, say so honestly, because willingness to learn it counts. The process includes a practical exercise working with a real component problem from our domain, described in full on the interview process page. Everyone who applies gets an answer.

Frequently asked questions

Look closely at how we build before you leap

Craft-driven engineers care about environment as much as title, so read how we work and see whether the review culture and squad rhythm fit how you do your best work. If they do, the jobs hub has this role and four others waiting, and we will be glad you took the long way round.