Software Engineer - Drupal Front-end

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 youYou 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 2.2 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:

• Establishing and maintaining front-end coding standards (linting configurations,

BEM discipline, component API consistency) and enforcing them through pull request review. * Mentoring other software engineers on component architecture, accessibilitytechniques, and Storybook/UI-first development workflows. * Making architectural recommendations about the component library: when tocreate new components versus extend existing ones, how to manage variants, and how to structure the design system as it grows. * Communicating clearly with designers, engineering peers, product owners, andother stakeholders.Skills and experience we are looking for

• A bachelor's degree in an IT, numerate, engineering, or science subject is desirable but not required.
• Full professional proficiency in English, both written and spoken.
• 5+ years of frontend engineering experience, including work within a CMS driven,

component-based environment (e.g., Drupal, Symfony, Craft CMS, or other Twig based systems). * Proven ability to implement and evolve component-based UIs and design systemcomponents within Drupal. * Strong grasp in CSS/SCSS, BEM methodology, design tokens, mobile-firstresponsive design, scoped component styles, and use of Atomic Design. * Solid JavaScript expertise (ES6+), with familiarity in modern frontend workflowsand package managers such as npm or pnpm. * Experience with visual regression testing tools

• Basic understanding of local development tooling, such as Docker, DDEV, or

Lando, along with responsible and executive use of AI coding assistants.Desirable:

• Experience contributing to open-source projects, particularly within the Drupal
• Awareness of emerging Drupal capabilities, including Drupal AI initiatives and

Drupal Canvas. * Understanding of Core Web Vitals and how to make performance-mindedfrontend decisions. * Familiarity with frontend accessibility tools such as Jest and auditing tools likeaxe, pa11y, or the Storybook a11y addon.For other essential and non-essential skills, please consult the related job description.What we offerAs well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits some of which are below:

• 41 Days holiday (27 days annual leave 8 bank holiday and 6 closure days)
• Additional 5 days' annual leave purchase scheme
• Defined benefit career average revalued earnings pension scheme (CARE)
• Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan
• Immigration loan
• Relocation scheme for certain posts
• On-Site nursery
• On-site gym
• Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption pay
• Employee assistance programme: Staff Support Service
• Discounted medical insurance

About usUCL is a world-leading teaching and research university, often ranked in the top ten in the world with an annual turnover of well over £1 billion. Part of UCL's vision is to take on the hardest global challenges. The Information Services Division (ISD) is the primary provider of IT services to UCL. We support and enhance learning, teaching, research and administrative processes by providing information and technology-related services to over 50,000 staff and students of UCL and associated institutions.Our ambition is to be the leading IT services group in the HE sector and we are growing our team's capability in experience/UX, agile development, security, cloud, service management and partnering. We are modernising our technology foundations, digitising the processes of the university to transform experience for students and staff, and partnering across the university to drive differentiation in UCL education and research.About the roleThis is an incredible opportunity to join the, Visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/rewards-and-benefits to find out more.Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and InclusionAs London's Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world's talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong.We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL's workforce.These include people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, womenAvailable documents