At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer-driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience—from e-bike and electric vehicle servicing to on-demand solutions. Our commitment is to foster customer loyalty by offering compelling reasons to keep coming back to our stores, ensuring a lifetime of motoring and cycling enjoyment.
Halfords is quickly becoming a digital services business. In addition to being a leading UK retailer, Halfords has now developed a market leading field service management platform that enables businesses to deliver their complex services to customers through an end-to-end digital solution. The platform is deployed throughout Halfords stores, garages and their mobile business. The platform has now been taken to market to enable other businesses in our sector and other industries globally to deliver market leading service delivery and an unrivalled customer experience. This SaaS division is called Avayler (Avayler.com).
As the leading global Garage Management and Mobile Van software platform, we help customers become operationally efficient and compliant through our advanced technology. We were born in 2020 and whilst we are a division of Halfords, the No 1 provider of motoring and cycling products, we are a stand-alone entity.
At Avayler, we truly are striving to become a global company, targeting both the USA and European markets and we are scaling our business at a pace, so if you’re willing to get stuck in, you’ll love it here too. So put yourself at the heart of a dynamic, fast-paced working environment where expertise and focus take people far.
This is a remote position that may involve occasional travel
As Principal Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping the future of our frontend platform and the way our engineering teams build, scale, and deliver products globally. Working closely with the Head of Engineering, you’ll bring deep React expertise to the most complex challenges in the business, helping teams move faster while raising the bar on quality, performance, and maintainability. You’ll be a trusted technical authority, influencing architectural decisions and setting standards that enable consistent, high-quality delivery.
This is a hands-on role, balancing strategic thinking with real-world problem solving. You’ll design and build new features, tackle core frontend challenges, and explore emerging technologies, including AI-assisted development to improve how we work. Through mentoring, guilds, and knowledge sharing, you’ll elevate frontend capability across the organisation, promoting best practice in React, TypeScript, testing, accessibility, and performance. Your focus will always be on building for the future: scalable architectures, reusable components, and tooling that allows teams to deliver efficiently at scale.
We’re moving from a startup environment into a more mature, scalable phase, and this role is central to that transition. You’ll help optimise our frontend platform and development practices so we can grow without adding unnecessary complexity or headcount. If you’re a React expert who enjoys solving hard problems, influencing how great software is built, and creating a stable foundation for long-term growth, this role gives you the autonomy, impact, and technical depth to do exactly that.
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Act as the technical authority for our React frontend, setting standards and best practice across architecture, performance, accessibility, and testing.
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Champion modern React patterns, tooling, and frameworks, staying ahead of industry trends and applying them pragmatically.
