Principal Frontend Engineer – Build the Future of Cox Automotive Europe
Location: Manchester – Hybrid
Are you a visionary engineer who loves solving complex problems, shaping modern architectures, and building products that scale?
Do you thrive in greenfield environments where you can influence the entire technical direction?
If so, this is your chance to help build the Connected Platform that will power Cox Automotive Europe for the next decade.
Within CAPTG, Product Engineering leads the development of high‑quality, cloud‑native software products used across Cox Automotive Europe. We embrace modern engineering practices, DevOps, automation and continuous delivery, all underpinned by a strong engineering culture.
Now, we’re building our Connected Platform—a brand-new foundational product that will bring every Cox Automotive system together and give our customers a single view of all their assets. This is a once‑in‑a‑generation opportunity to influence the architecture of a major new platform from scratch.
The Opportunity
As a Principal Engineer – Frontend, you’ll be a hands-on technical leader who sets standards, drives best practice, and shapes the future of our platform.
This isn’t just about writing great code (though you’ll absolutely do that).
It’s about:
✨ Guiding engineering teams with technical excellence
✨ Influencing our tech stack, patterns and principles
✨ Partnering with Architecture, DevOps, Infrastructure, Data and Product
✨ Driving innovation and continuous improvement
You’ll help shape this—but here’s where we’re heading:
- Cloud: AWS (cloud native, managed services first)
- IaC: Terraform
- Messaging: Kafka / AWS MSK, SNS/SQS, EventBridge
- Frontend: React + micro-frontends
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions
A modern stack for a modern platform.
What You’ll Lead & Deliver
Technical Leadership
Guide, mentor and elevate engineers. Set engineering standards, influence culture, and lead by example.
Work with cross‑functional teams to create scalable, secure, high-performance systems and micro-frontend architectures.
Hands-on Engineering
Deliver high-quality code across our stack—frontend, backend, and cloud.
Collaborate with DevOps and Infrastructure to optimise AWS environments for reliability, resilience and cost.
System Performance & Integration
Tune performance, eliminate bottlenecks, and integrate new greenfield systems with existing platforms.
Quality & Test Automation
Shape the tools and automation that ensure our code is always ready for production.
Security & Compliance
Embed secure-by-design principles throughout everything we build.
Data & Real-time Streaming
Leverage event-driven patterns to support real-time data flows and decoupled services.
Partner with Architects, Designers, Product Managers, Data Engineers and others to drive delivery and continuous improvement.
…