Frontend Engineer Job Description
A complete frontend engineer job description template, plus the ATS keywords hiring teams screen for and where UI implementation ends and design begins.
"Frontend Engineer" postings routinely blur two different jobs into one title. One is building and maintaining the client-side architecture of a production application — state management, data fetching, rendering performance, testing. The other is closer to implementing visual designs from Figma with limited say over how the code underneath is structured. Both get called Frontend Engineer. The requirements section tells you which one you're looking at; the title does not.
Framework syntax stopped being the real screening bar a while ago. Interviewers now spend more time on how a candidate reasons about component state, why a page's load performance is slow, or how they'd structure data fetching to avoid a waterfall of requests, than on whether they can recite a framework's lifecycle methods from memory. A candidate who has only built small personal projects is often unprepared for this half of the interview, because that instinct for diagnosing a real performance problem only develops on a codebase with actual production traffic.
Mid-level title inflation hits frontend roles particularly hard. Some companies use "mid-level" to mean two years of experience; others mean five or more. Frontend compounds this because a large share of self-taught and bootcamp-trained engineers enter the field with strong framework skills but limited exposure to the parts of the job that don't show up in a portfolio — accessibility, cross-browser quirks, and the discipline of shipping to real users instead of a personal demo.
Verrantine · Remote (US)
Full-time · Remote
$115,000 – $155,000
About the role
Verrantine is hiring a Frontend Engineer to work on the customer-facing web application our paying customers use every day. You'll spend most of your time in React and TypeScript, building and maintaining the interfaces people rely on, with a particular focus on performance and accessibility now that the app has grown well past its original scope.
This is a fully remote position within the continental US, working alongside two other frontend engineers and a product designer. The frontend carries real technical debt from years of fast iteration, and we're looking for someone who wants to both ship new features and steadily improve what's already there — not a rewrite project.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain UI components and pages in React and TypeScript, from a design handoff through to production.
- Own the client-side data layer — fetching, caching and state management — for the features your team ships.
- Diagnose and fix performance regressions using real user metrics rather than guesswork.
- Partner with a product designer during the design phase, catching implementation problems before they reach code.
- Write automated tests for the components and flows you build, and keep the existing suite healthy.
- Review other engineers' pull requests, with particular attention to accessibility and cross-browser behavior.
- Participate in an on-call rotation covering the frontend build pipeline and production incidents, roughly one week in six.
- Contribute to the shared component library used across the product, rather than one-off styling per feature.
What we're looking for
- Three or more years building production web applications with a modern JavaScript framework.
- Strong working knowledge of TypeScript, including typing complex component props and API responses.
- Solid CSS fundamentals — layout, responsive design and browser quirks — not only what a component library provides.
- Experience integrating with REST or GraphQL APIs, including handling loading, error and empty states properly.
- Familiarity with automated frontend testing, not only manual QA in the browser.
- Comfort reading a performance trace or profiler output well enough to find the actual bottleneck.
Nice to have
- React specifically, given that's what the team uses today.
- Next.js or another server-rendering framework.
- Hands-on accessibility experience — WCAG guidelines applied to real components, not just awareness of them.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining a shared design system or component library.
- Familiarity with Figma well enough to work directly from design files without a translation step.
- Some backend exposure, enough to read the API you're calling rather than treat it as a black box.
Benefits
- Medical, dental and vision coverage, with employee premiums covered in full.
- 401(k) with a 4% company match, vested immediately.
- $1,200 annual home-office stipend, plus a one-time equipment budget for new hires.
- $2,000 annual learning budget, usable on conferences, courses or books.
- Twenty days of paid time off plus company holidays.
Salary range
As posted for this sample role. Real pay varies by employer, location and experience.
$115,000–$155,000/ yr
ATS keywords for this role
The applicant tracking system (ATS) — the recruiting software a hiring team searches and filters applicants with — will screen for these. Weight shows how central each one is to this specific posting.
Required and central (3)
Important (9)
Mentioned in passing (9)
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a Frontend Engineer and a UI/UX Designer?
A meaningful one, even though postings sometimes blur it. A designer decides what the interface should look like and how it should behave; a frontend engineer builds it in code, and increasingly owns things a designer never touches — data fetching, performance, and how the interface behaves when data doesn't arrive on time. Some frontend roles do skew toward implementing designs with little architectural input, which is worth clarifying before you accept an offer.
Is TypeScript required, or is JavaScript experience enough?
Plain JavaScript experience is a reasonable starting point, but most production frontend teams write TypeScript by default now, and a posting that lists it under requirements usually means it. If your background is JavaScript-only, expect a screening question that tests whether you can read and reason about types, even if you haven't written much of them yourself.
How much backend knowledge does a frontend engineer actually need?
Enough to read an API response and have an opinion about it — not enough to build the API yourself. The stronger frontend engineers can tell when a bug is actually a backend problem, describe it precisely, and avoid wasting a cycle guessing at fixes on the wrong side of the request.
Do I need a portfolio if I already have production experience?
Less than early-career candidates do. With real production experience, your work history carries more weight than a personal project, and most interviewers spend more time on your code samples or a live exercise than on a portfolio site. A portfolio still helps if your day job's code is proprietary and can't be shown.
This was a sample. Your resume should be tailored to the real thing.
Rezi Ninja reads an actual job posting and rewrites your resume to match it, with a Ninja Score so you know it lands before you hit send. Free to start, with the AI usage included.