About the role
This is an incredible opportunity to join the Digital Experience product team as a Drupal Front-end Senior Software Engineer, helping shape how UCL’s digital platforms look, feel, and behave. You will work within an Agile delivery environment, delivering user value through frequent product releases.
This role has a primary focus on front-end engineering within UCL’s CMS Drupal platform, evolving and delivering accessible, component-based user interfaces aligned to UCL’s central design system. The role works closely with UX/UI design, content, and backend engineering teams to ensure accessible, consistent, scalable, and user centred experiences across UCL’s web estate used daily by thousands of people, including website editors, staff, students, and members of the public.
The day-to-day work mainly revolves around looking after our Drupal theme: a mature. Emulsify-based component library using Atomic Design, Storybook, Twig, SCSS (BEM), and vanilla JavaScript. In this role, you will build and maintain accessible, responsive components in isolation using Storybook, then integrate them into Drupal’s template layer using established composition patterns.
About you
You are an experienced senior front-end engineer who cares deeply about user experience, accessibility, and building UIs that are robust and maintainable.
You understand component-driven development: you know how to classify a piece of UI within an Atomic Design hierarchy, structure it with BEM naming, build it in isolation in
Storybook, and connect it to a CMS template layer. You are comfortable working with
design tokens (CSS custom properties) and SCSS architecture, and you care about
keeping styles scoped, accessible, and responsive.
You thrive in cross-disciplinary teams, and you are confident working with UX/UI
designers in a shared workflow. You can interpret design deliverables in Figma (or
similar tool), follow up with questions about intent and feasibility, and turn designs into
high-quality, production-ready components while also influencing better outcomes
through constructive feedback and practical solutions.
You will ensure component consistency across websites sharing a common theme,
where a change in one place affects every site. You hold accessibility to a high standard: WCAG AA compliance, keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and colour contrast ratios are part of your normal workflow, not an afterthought. You bring technical leadership through:
1. Establishing and maintaining front-end coding standards (linting configurations,
BEM discipline, component API consistency) and enforcing them through pull
request review.
2. Mentoring other software engineers on component architecture, accessibility
techniques, and Storybook/UI-first development workflows.
3. Making architectural recommendations about the component library: when to
create new components versus extend existing ones, how to manage variants,
and how to structure the design system as it grows.
4. Communicating clearly with designers, engineering peers, product owners, and
other stakeholders.
Skills and experience we are looking for:
5. A bachelor’s degree in an IT, numerate, engineering, or science subject is desirable but not required.
6. Full professional proficiency in English, both written and spoken.
7. 5+ years of frontend engineering experience, including work within a CMS driven,
component-based environment (, Drupal, Symfony, Craft CMS, or other Twig
based systems).
8. Proven ability to implement and evolve component-based UIs and design system
components within Drupal.
9. Strong grasp in CSS/SCSS, BEM methodology, design tokens, mobile-first
responsive design, scoped component styles, and use of Atomic Design.
10. Solid JavaScript expertise (ES6+), with familiarity in modern frontend workflows
and package managers such as npm or pnpm.
11. Experience with visual regression testing tools
12. Basic understanding of local development tooling, such as Docker, DDEV, or
Lando, along with responsible and executive use of AI coding assistants.
Desirable:
13. Experience contributing to open-source projects, particularly within the Drupal
14. Awareness of emerging Drupal capabilities, including Drupal AI initiatives and
Drupal Canvas.
15. Understanding of Core Web Vitals and how to make performance-minded
frontend decisions.
16. Familiarity with frontend accessibility tools such as Jest and auditing tools like
axe, pa11y, or the Storybook a11y addon.
For other essential and non-essential skills, please consult the related job description.
What we offer
As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits some of which are below:
17. 41 Days holiday (27 days annual leave 8 bank holiday and 6 closure days)
18. Additional 5 days’ annual leave purchase scheme
19. Defined benefit career average revalued earnings pension scheme (CARE)
20. Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan
21. Immigration loan
22. Relocation scheme for certain posts
23. On-Site nursery
24. On-site gym
25. Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption pay
26. Employee assistance programme: Staff Support Service
27. Discounted medical insurance