Digital Design Developer (Freelance) in London, United Kingdom

3-5 days per week, hybrid work policy in central London office

Wonderbly is looking for a freelance design developer. You will join the team on a mission to reimagine  https://jobeax.com/link/BF9JrJ8hoQtCb8wa with an entirely new product proposition. You will be thinking of and building the best customer interactions, motion and typography needed for people to easily capture their most precious memories that can be shared with the closest people in their life.

As an expert frontend engineer with great visual and storytelling instincts, you are equally comfortable building out storyboards and tools as you are collaborating with designers and editors to refine ideas. You will be a bridge between the creative vision and functional code.

You'll be working within a small, focused team with a fair amount of autonomy. We're not looking for someone to execute a perfect brief. We're looking for someone with the judgment to help us figure out the right thing to build, and then build it well.

The initial contract is three months, but it could grow as the work and our working relationship develop. We'll agree on a competitive day rate based on your experience.

What’s important to us

The work you're doing feeds directly into beautifully made, deeply personal books that people treasure for life. The customer needs to connect with this on first contact with our website.

We believe the best collaboration happens in person. This role requires you in our Bloomsbury studio on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. It's a lovely place to work. The rest of the week is flexible.

We're an AI-first engineering team and want someone who brings that same orientation: using AI tools thoughtfully to move faster and have greater impact by tackling harder problems.

Requirements

What you will need

• Proven track record of collaborating with designers and product people with a portfolio that demonstrates your attention to visual user experiences
• 5+ years of creative frontend development with experience across many modern stacks and tools
• Strong visual design fundamentals, including typography, layout, motion and interaction alongside communication skills that influence the overall experience
• A history of web animation projects using CSS, WAAPI, GSAP or similar
• Experience with collaborative coding workflows including the use of agentic software development in a team environment
• Keen desire to understand how real people interact with your UX to make further improvements

Our tech stack

• Lit 3, nanostores, Typescript and Vite for the personalisation flow
• React 19, Typescript, Vite, Tailwind CSS and React Query for our book building backend
• Style Dictionary 4, CSS custom properties and theme slots to power our design system
• Services deployed on Render and JS/CSS bundle served from Fastly
• Good DX (could you make it better?)