Principal Frontend Engineer

What do we do? Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 5000 software sellers in 245 territories globally. The Role: We're hiring a Principal Frontend Engineer to drive Paddle's company-wide technical vision for our frontend architecture and user experience to the next level. You'll act as the technical authority for foundational frontend architectural decisions, leading long-term, cross-team initiatives that shape how we design, build, and operate performant, and accessible user interfaces. This is our most senior frontend technical position, where the depth of your technical expertise is as important as your leadership and influence qualities. You're excited about pushing the browser to it’s limits, comfortable owning complex technical decisions, and you’ll serve as the primary technical authority for frontend technologies across the organization. This role is ideal for someone who blends deep frontend systems expertise with strategic thinking and genuine empathy for our customers' experience. What you'll do: - Own and articulate the long-term technical vision and architectural strategy for Paddle's frontend ecosystem, aligning it with product and company goals. - Define durable frontend architectural patterns, component libraries, and design systems that enable multiple teams to build consistently and safely at speed. - Champion innovation in user experience technology, driving adoption of emerging frontend patterns that deliver measurable improvements in performance, accessibility, and developer velocity. - Initiate and drive large, complex programmes of work that simplify frontend systems, improve performance metrics, and accelerate feature delivery. - Serve as the decision-maker on high-stakes technical choices and architectural trade-offs in frontend technologies, ensuring durable, high-quality outcomes. - Develop deep product fluency: become an expert in how our user interfaces deliver value to customers, connecting frontend architecture decisions to user satisfaction, conversion rates, and business metrics. - Partner with Product, Design, and other stakeholders to turn ambitious user experience ideas into feasible technical implementations. - Elevate frontend operational excellence: establish monitoring, performance profiling, and debugging patterns that drive teams to be proactive and data-driven in managing their frontend applications. - Mentor Staff and Senior engineers, grow frontend technical leadership capability across the org, and champion engineering excellence and pragmatic simplicity. - Represent Paddle's frontend technical direction in executive and cross-functional forums, communicating complex concepts with clarity and influence. We’d love to hear from you if you: - Bring deep expertise designing and evolving large-scale, business-critical frontend systems with strong foundations in performance, accessibility, and maintainability. - Have extensive knowledge of frontend technology patterns and can demonstrate mastery of React, TypeScript, and modern JavaScript ecosystems. - Have deep domain expertise in web service technologies relevant to frontend deployment (CDNs, monitoring tools like Sentry, performance optimization). - Have a track record of leading company-level frontend technical strategy and delivering multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives with measurable impact. - Operate comfortably as an architect, strategist, and problem solver: defining clear architectural direction for frontend systems, connecting user experience to business outcomes, and unblocking the hardest technical cha