Front-End Developer Job Description (Template and Samples)

Q: What is a typical front-end developer career profile in Japan?

Most front-end developers in Japan arrive from one of three routes: a web production background moving from markup into application work, a general software engineering start that specialised into the browser, or a design-adjacent route through UI implementation. Junior sits at roughly one to three years, mid at three to six, and senior beyond six with ownership of architecture and of other people's output through review. Changing company every three to four years is normal and is not the negative signal it would be in an older Japanese company.

Q: How many years of experience should I ask for?

State a band, not a floor, and keep it to about three years wide. Asking for a precise minimum filters out the strongest candidates in a market this small, because a good engineer with two years of focused component work will outperform a weak one with six. If the role genuinely needs someone who has already carried a rewrite or owned a design system, say that instead, since it describes the evidence you want rather than the time served.

Q: Should a front-end developer job description in Japan specify a framework?

Name the stack you run, but make the framework a preferred qualification rather than a mandatory one unless the hire has to be productive in week one. React and Vue dominate the Japanese market, with Vue notably more common here than in the US or Europe. A strong React developer picks up Vue in a few weeks. Making the specific framework mandatory can remove half your pool for a gap that closes inside a probation period.

Q: What salary should I put in a front-end developer job description in Japan?

As a broad guide for Tokyo, junior front-end roles sit around 4 to 6 million yen a year, mid-level around 6 to 9 million, and senior around 9 to 14 million, with bilingual and product-company roles at the upper end and agency or SIer roles lower. Publish the band as an annual figure, say whether it assumes a fixed overtime allowance, and say how many months of bonus are included. A figure that quietly assumes a full bonus reads as a bait number when the offer arrives.

Q: Do I need to state Japanese level and visa sponsorship?

Yes, and state both explicitly. These two lines decide the size of your candidate pool before a single technical requirement is read. Describe the language situation rather than naming a JLPT level: daily stand-up in Japanese, specifications in Japanese, or customer-facing meetings in Japanese. Silence on sponsorship is read as no by the candidates who need it and as yes by the ones who hope for it, which costs you applicants at the top of the funnel and wastes time further down.

Q: What is the difference between a job description and a role profile?

A job description is the advertisement: what you publish to attract applications. A role profile is the internal definition behind it: the full set of technical and non-technical duties for the role at industry standard, the competencies that predict contribution, and the expectations at each level. You write the job description from the role profile by deciding which duties this particular hire owns and which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable for your team.

I wrote the perfect Front-End Developer job description for you

If this is the first or second front-end developer you have hired, the hardest part is not writing the posting. It is knowing what to put in it. You cannot benchmark the role against anyone already on the team, the requirement list is a guess, and a guess that runs too long quietly removes most of a candidate pool that was small to begin with.

I have spent 12 years recruiting engineers in Japan, after hiring across EMEA as a Google recruiter. Rewriting job descriptions is the first thing I do with a new client, because it is where most failed searches are actually decided. The version below reflects what front-end developers in Tokyo currently do and what they are paid.

Start with the template and fill in the panel beside it. If you are unsure of the level you need, read the three samples. Then use the role profile, duties, requirements and levelling sections to decide which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable and which are trade-offs you can afford.

Front-End Developer JD Page Summary

Editable template

Front-End Developer Job Description Template

Click any line in the document and type. The highlighted fields update everywhere they appear, and everything else is yours to rewrite. When it reads right, download it as a PDF. Nothing is stored and there is no signup.

Front-End Developer at Google

1Company Intro

Two lines, not two paragraphs. What you build and how big the team is. The reader is deciding whether this is a real product team or an agency bench.

Google builds Search, Maps and Workspace. We are a team of 12 engineers based in Tokyo, working hybrid, 3 days a week in the office. The front end has a named owner here rather than being everyone's second priority.

2Role Mission

State the outcome, not the tasks. What does the front end look like in six months if this hire works out? Senior candidates read this line first.

Own the browser layer of Search, Maps and Workspace: the interface our users touch, the components the rest of the team builds on, and the performance and accessibility of both. Within six months we expect the front end to be something the team ships against confidently rather than works around.

3Role and Responsibilities

Five to eight lines, each one a deliverable you could ask about at interview. If you cannot test it, it is filler and it costs you applications.

Build and ship user-facing features in TypeScript, React and Angular, from the interface design through to production.
Own and grow a shared component library so patterns are built once and reused rather than reimplemented per screen.
Decide how data moves through the client, and define the contract with the back end: what the interface needs, in what shape, and what happens when a request fails.
Hold the front end to a measurable performance budget across LCP, INP and CLS, and be able to say what changed when one of them moves.
Make the product usable with a keyboard and a screen reader, working to WCAG 2.2 AA as the baseline rather than as a later fix.
Write the tests that matter: unit tests for logic, component tests for behaviour, and end-to-end cover for the flows that must never break.
Work with design on what is feasible, and push back with alternatives when an interaction will not survive real data.
Review other people's front-end code and leave the codebase easier to work in than you found it.

4Mandatory Qualifications (MQs)

Three to five, no more. Every extra must-have multiplies against the others, and the mid-career front-end pool in Japan is small before you filter.

Commercial experience building and maintaining a production front end, including maintaining something after it shipped.
At least one feature owned end to end: design handoff, implementation, review, release, and the bugs that came back.
Strong JavaScript and TypeScript, with the browser fundamentals underneath a framework: the DOM, semantic HTML and modern CSS.
Fluency in at least one modern component framework, used in production. We run TypeScript, React and Angular, but another is fine.
Japanese level: specs and code review in English, some customer meetings in Japanese.

5Preferred Qualifications (PQs)

Everything you would like but would trade away. Be honest here: a preferred list that reads as mandatory defeats the point of splitting them.

A migration, rewrite or design-system rollout carried through to completion.
Testing beyond the unit level, such as Playwright, Cypress or visual regression.
Comfort with build tooling and the deployment path for front-end code, including CI and preview environments.
Performance profiling with real tools rather than intuition: Lighthouse, browser dev tools, field Web Vitals.
Experience shipping to Japanese users: input methods, form conventions and date handling.
Experience at a company at our stage, where the front end has not been formalised yet.

6Compensation Information

The annual figure, whether it assumes fixed overtime, and how many bonus months. Then say what decides where someone lands in the range: a wide band with no explanation costs you applicants, and disproportionately women. Plus the two lines that size your pool: Japanese level and visa.

¥6M to ¥9M per year. Most offers at this level start near ¥7M; the top of the range is for someone who has already owned a feature end to end and carried a migration through. This figure is the annual total and does not assume a bonus you have not earned. Social insurance, commuting allowance and paid leave follow Japanese statutory requirements. Visa: sponsorship available, including a change of status from within Japan. Process: four interview rounds, with a decision within two weeks.

Vector PDF with selectable text. Nothing is stored.

Worked examples

Sample Front-End Developer Job Descriptions

The same role at three levels.

Junior / Entry-level Front-End Developer

Mission

Ship well-scoped user-facing work to an agreed standard, with review, and become independent on the codebase within two quarters. Success at this level is reliable delivery of defined tasks, not deciding what the tasks should be.
Role and Responsibilities
- Implement screens and components from designs, working to the patterns already in the codebase.
- Fix bugs reported against the front end, and write the test that stops each one coming back.
- Take review feedback and apply it consistently rather than case by case.
- Keep new work accessible by default: semantic markup, keyboard operability, visible focus.
Mandatory Qualifications (MQs)
- Working JavaScript, HTML and CSS, demonstrated by something you have built and can walk through.
- Familiarity with one component framework, from study, an internship or commercial work.
- Comfort with Git in a team workflow.
Preferred Qualifications (PQs)
- TypeScript, or clear evidence of picking up a typed language quickly.
- Any commercial exposure, including part-time or contract work.
- A portfolio, side project or open-source contribution you can talk about in detail.
Compensation

Roughly ¥4M to ¥6M per year in Tokyo, with the top of the band for someone who has already shipped commercially rather than only studied. Say what moves a candidate within the range, and say who will review their work and how often: at this level both weigh heavily.
Mid-level Front-End Developer

Mission

Own features end to end, from the interface design through to what happens in production. Success at this level is that a feature handed to you comes back working, tested and maintainable, without needing to be specified in detail first.
Role and Responsibilities
- Build and ship features independently, including the edge cases nobody wrote down.
- Extend the shared component library, and refactor towards it when you find a pattern reimplemented.
- Define what the interface needs from the API, and negotiate that contract with the back end.
- Hold a performance budget across LCP, INP and CLS, and investigate when one of them moves.
- Review junior work with enough context that the feedback teaches rather than just corrects.
Mandatory Qualifications (MQs)
- Commercial experience on a production front-end application, including maintenance rather than only greenfield work.
- Strong TypeScript and confident use of at least one component framework.
- Semantic HTML, modern CSS, and a working understanding of accessibility.
- Testing habits: what you test at unit level, what you test in the browser, and why.
Preferred Qualifications (PQs)
- Design-system contribution beyond consuming one.
- Measurable performance work with before and after numbers.
- Experience shipping to a Japanese user base, including input methods, forms and date handling.
Compensation

Roughly ¥6M to ¥9M per year in Tokyo, with bilingual product companies at the upper end and the top of the band for someone who has owned a feature end to end. This is the most contested band in the market, so a vague posting at this level tends to go quiet rather than attract weak applicants.
Senior Front-End Developer

Mission

Own the front-end architecture and raise the output of everyone who touches it. Success at this level is measured through other people's work as much as your own: the standard of what ships, and how quickly the team can ship it.
Role and Responsibilities
- Set the front-end architecture: rendering strategy, state management, and where the boundaries sit.
- Own the design system and the standards other engineers build against.
- Lead the technical parts of planning, including telling product what a proposal will actually cost.
- Set the performance and accessibility budgets, and hold the team to them.
- Mentor through review and pairing, and be the person who unblocks a stuck front-end problem.
Mandatory Qualifications (MQs)
- Deep commercial front-end experience, including at least one system you owned through a significant change such as a migration or rewrite.
- Architectural judgement you can defend: what you chose, what you rejected, and what it cost.
- A track record of raising other engineers, through review, mentoring or standards work.
- Comfort making decisions with incomplete information and revisiting them when the information arrives.
Preferred Qualifications (PQs)
- Experience as the first or only senior front-end person in a small company.
- Public technical work: talks, writing or open source.
- Bilingual working ability, which materially widens what the role can cover in a Japanese company.
Compensation

Roughly ¥9M to ¥14M per year in Tokyo, higher at funded product companies and foreign firms, with the top of the band for someone who has carried a front end through a migration or rewrite. At this level candidates are usually not actively looking, so the posting has to say what they would own that they do not own today.

Junior / Entry-level Front-End Developer job description sample

0 to 3 years · ¥4M to ¥6M

Understanding the role

What does a Front-End Developer do?

Front-End Developer mission

A front-end developer owns the part of your product the user actually touches. That breaks into three objectives, and a job description that misses one of them will attract the wrong shortlist.

Ship the interface

Turn designs and requirements into working, tested screens that behave correctly on real devices and real connections, not only on the machine they were built on.
Build the shared foundation

A component library and a set of patterns, so the same problems are solved once rather than per screen. It is what keeps the tenth feature as fast to build as the first.
Hold the quality bar

Performance, accessibility and resilience. The objective most often left out of a job description, and most often the reason a product feels worse than its competitors despite having the same features.

How a Front-End Developer fits within your organization

In a small company the front-end developer usually sits inside a single product engineering team rather than a separate front-end group, reporting to an engineering manager, a tech lead, or in the smallest companies directly to the founder. Below roughly fifteen engineers there is rarely a front-end team at all, which means this hire is the front end rather than a member of it. That is worth being explicit about in the posting, because it is a genuine attraction for some candidates and a genuine deterrent for others.

Their day-to-day stakeholders are design, back-end engineering and product. With design they negotiate what is feasible and what an interaction costs. With back-end they define the API contract, which is where most delivery friction in a small team actually originates. With product they translate a requirement into a scope, and say what will have to give. In a customer-facing company they may also work directly with sales or support on what users are struggling with.

Measuring performance for a Front-End Developer

The impact of a good front-end developer shows up in three places: how quickly the team can ship a new screen, how often front-end work has to be redone, and how the product feels to a user on a mid-range phone. None of those are visible in a commit count, which is why front-end performance reviews so often end up measuring the wrong thing.

Usable measures, in rough order of value: Core Web Vitals on your real traffic rather than a lab score; reuse rate of shared components against one-off implementations; defect escape rate on front-end tickets; time from design handoff to production for a comparable screen; and for mid-level and above, review turnaround and quality, since a senior front-end developer's largest contribution is usually made through other people's pull requests.

The basis of the template

Front-End Developer Role Profile

A role profile is the internal definition behind a job description. Where the job description is the advertisement, the role profile is the full industry-standard scope of the position: every duty the role can cover, technical and non-technical, before you decide which ones this particular hire owns. It is what lets you tell a genuine requirement from a preference, because a duty you are not actually asking this person to own should not be generating a requirement in your posting.

Front-End Developer Technical Duties

9 duties

Interface implementation Build screens and flows from design, including responsive behaviour, empty states, loading states and error states.
Component architecture Design and maintain reusable components and the conventions that govern them.
State and data flow Decide how data moves through the client, including caching, optimistic updates and invalidation.
API integration Define what the interface needs from the back end and handle failure, latency and partial data.
Performance Own bundle size, rendering cost and Core Web Vitals against a stated budget: LCP, INP and CLS since INP replaced FID in March 2024.
Accessibility Meet WCAG 2.2 AA: semantics, keyboard operability, focus management, contrast.
Testing Unit tests for logic, component tests for behaviour, end-to-end tests for the flows that must never break.
Build and delivery Maintain the build pipeline, preview environments and the path front-end code takes to production.
Browser and device support Define the support matrix and keep the product working across it.

Front-End Developer Non-Technical Duties

7 duties

Stakeholder communication Explain a technical constraint to product or sales in terms of what it means for them.
Design collaboration Assess feasibility early and offer alternatives rather than declining late.
Code review Review others' work with enough context that the feedback teaches.
Documentation Write down the conventions and decisions so the next person does not have to reverse-engineer them.

Mentoring and team support Raise the level of less experienced engineers deliberately rather than incidentally, and be the person who unblocks a stuck front-end problem. Mid-level and above
Technical advocacy Make the case for work with no visible feature attached, such as accessibility or a dependency upgrade. Mid-level and above
Hiring support Help assess future front-end candidates once they are established. Senior

In detail

Front-End Developer Duties and Responsibilities

The duties from the role profile, explained. Use these to decide which ones belong in your posting: a duty you are not asking this hire to own should not be producing a requirement.

Building and shipping user-facing features

The core of the job. Taking a design and a requirement and producing a working screen, including everything the design did not show: what happens while data loads, what happens when it fails, what happens with forty items instead of four, and what happens on a phone in a train tunnel. The gap between a junior and a mid-level front-end developer is mostly visible here, and it is worth interviewing for directly.
Owning the component library and front-end architecture

Deciding what becomes a shared component and what stays local, how state is managed, and where boundaries sit. This is what keeps velocity flat as the product grows instead of decaying. In a small company it is usually informal for the first year, which is exactly why hiring someone who will do it deliberately pays off.
Performance and Core Web Vitals

Owning what the user waits for: bundle size, rendering cost, image strategy, and the measurements that prove it. In Japan this matters more than most teams assume, because mobile usage is high and a meaningful share of traffic runs on mid-range devices rather than the flagship phone the team tests on.
Accessibility

Building to WCAG 2.2 AA as a default rather than as a remediation project. Only about a third of large-company front-end postings mention accessibility at all, so saying it plainly is a differentiator as much as a requirement. Semantic markup, keyboard operability, focus management, contrast and screen-reader behaviour. This is increasingly a procurement requirement for Japanese enterprise customers, so for a B2B product it can be a commercial requirement rather than only an ethical one.
Working with design and back-end

Negotiating feasibility with design before a direction is locked, and defining the API contract with back-end before implementation starts. In a small team most delivery friction traces back to one of these two conversations not having happened early enough, which makes it worth testing at interview rather than assuming.
Testing and code review

Deciding what to test and at which level, and reviewing other people's front-end code. From mid-level upwards, review is where a good hire's influence compounds: it is how conventions spread and how the rest of the team gets better at the browser layer.

What to ask for

Front-End Developer Requirements

Every requirement is either something that screens a candidate out or something that breaks a tie between two good ones. Sorting them that way is most of the work, because the mid-career front-end pool in Japan is small before you start filtering.

Must have

Screens people out. Keep it to three to five in total, across every category below. Across thirty-three front-end postings at Stripe, Reddit, Coinbase, Amazon and others, the median is seven, which is most of why those roles sit open.

Nice to have

Breaks a tie between two candidates you would both interview. Costs nothing to list.

Front-End Developer Experience requirements

Something built and shipped

An internship, freelance job, or a substantial personal project you can walk through end to end.
One feature, start to finish

Even a small one: designed, built, reviewed, released, and then fixed after release.

Commercial exposure of any kind

Part-time, contract or internship work. It is the review habits that transfer, not the scale.
Shipped to Japanese users

Rare at this level, and a genuine advantage when it is there.
- Input methods
- Form conventions
A portfolio you can defend

Not a gallery. One project where you can explain what you traded away and why.

Production front-end experience

Shipped a real application and then maintained it, rather than only building new ones.
A full feature cycle

Design handoff, implementation, review, release, and the bugs that came back afterwards.
Owned scope end to end

At least one piece of work owned rather than assigned in pieces.

A similar size and stage

A company where the front end was not yet formalised, so the work was defining it.
A migration carried through

Finished, not abandoned halfway. The finishing is the part that is hard to fake.
- Framework migration
- Rewrite
- Design-system rollout
Shipped to Japanese users

The details that only show up in this market.
- Input methods
- Form conventions
- Date handling
- Vertical text
Domain exposure

Useful, but rarely worth trading technical depth for.

A system owned through change

At least one front end carried through a migration, rewrite or major redesign, not only steady-state maintenance.
Architecture decisions you can defend

What you chose, what you rejected, and what each one cost.
A record of raising others

Through review, mentoring or standards work, deliberately rather than incidentally.

First or only senior front-end person

Somewhere the role had to be defined rather than inherited.
Public technical work

Optional, and a fast way to assess how someone thinks.
- Talks
- Writing
- Open source
Bilingual working ability

Materially widens what the role can cover in a Japanese company.

Front-End Developer Skill requirements

Working JavaScript, HTML and CSS

Demonstrated by something you built, not by a list on a CV.
- JavaScript
- The DOM
Familiarity with one framework

From study, an internship or commercial work. Depth comes later.
- React
- Vue
- Angular
- Svelte
Git in a team workflow

Branches, pull requests, and acting on review without taking it personally.

TypeScript

Or clear evidence of picking up a typed language quickly.
- TypeScript
Testing awareness

Knows what a unit test is for and has written a few.
- Vitest
Design-tool basics

Enough to open a file and read the spacing.
- Figma

JavaScript and TypeScript

With the fundamentals underneath, not only the framework on top.
- The DOM
- The event loop
- How the network shapes what a user sees
One component framework, in production

Which one matters far less than the depth.
- React
- Vue
- Angular
- Svelte
Semantic HTML and modern CSS

Layout and responsive behaviour, not a memorised set of class names.
- Flexbox
- Grid
- Container queries
- Custom properties
Git in a team workflow

And the review habits that go with it.

Your specific framework

Keep this preferred unless the hire has to be productive in week one.
Testing beyond unit level

Someone who has decided what to test in a browser and what to test in isolation.
- Playwright
- Cypress
- Vitest
- Visual regression
Build tooling and delivery

Enough to keep the pipeline healthy without waiting for someone else.
- Vite
- Webpack
- GitHub Actions
- Preview environments
Performance profiling

With real tools rather than intuition.
- Lighthouse
- Chrome DevTools
- Web Vitals
Design-tool fluency

Enough to inspect a file and read the spacing without asking.
- Figma

Architecture judgement

Rendering strategy, state management, and where the boundaries sit.
Performance and accessibility budgets

Sets them, publishes them, and holds the team to them.
- Web Vitals
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Framework depth you can justify

Why this one, what it costs, and when you would leave it.
- React
- Vue
- Angular
Review that teaches

The largest contribution a senior front-end developer makes is through other people's pull requests.

Design-system ownership

Built or owned one, rather than only consumed one.
Build and delivery ownership

The path front-end code takes to production, and who can change it.
- Vite
- Webpack
- GitHub Actions
A test strategy, not test tools

What must never break, and what level catches it cheapest.
- Playwright
- Cypress
- Visual regression
Bilingual working ability

At this level the role usually has to negotiate outside the engineering team.

Front-End Developer Education

No degree requirement

Requiring a computer science degree removes a large share of the strongest junior candidates in Japan, many of whom came through bootcamps, web production or self-study.
A degree only if you sponsor a visa

For the Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services status, a relevant degree or documented equivalent experience is part of what Immigration assesses. That is a reason to record a background accurately, not to require a degree.

A relevant bachelor's degree

Any of these is relevant. At this level it is a signal, not a substitute for shipped work.
- Computer Science
- Software Engineering
- Information Science
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Mathematics
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Design
A structured programme

The most common route into front-end work in Japan. Judge the portfolio, not the provider.
- Le Wagon Tokyo
- Code Chrysalis
- 42 Tokyo
- RUNTEQ
- TechAcademy
- DIVE INTO CODE
- Recursion
Evidence of self-teaching

At junior level this is the strongest predictor you have.
- Recent study
- Open-source contribution
- Side projects

No degree requirement

By mid-level the work history already answers what a degree would only have hinted at.
A degree only if you sponsor a visa

For the Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services status, a relevant degree or documented equivalent experience is part of what Immigration assesses.

A relevant bachelor's degree

Relevant, and by now close to the least interesting thing on the CV.
- Computer Science
- Software Engineering
- Information Science
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Mathematics
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Design
Postgraduate study

Signals depth in a specialism. Rarely signals speed at shipping interfaces.
- Master's
- Doctorate
A structured programme

Worth as much as the work it produced. Ask to see what they built, not the certificate.
- Le Wagon Tokyo
- Code Chrysalis
- 42 Tokyo
- RUNTEQ
- TechAcademy
- DIVE INTO CODE
- Recursion
Evidence of continued learning

Front-end moves; someone who stopped learning in 2019 will show it.
- Recent study
- Conference talks
- Open-source contribution

No degree requirement

At this level a degree tells you nothing you cannot read directly from the work.
A degree only if you sponsor a visa

Still relevant to the Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services application, where documented professional experience can stand in place of a degree.

Postgraduate study in a specialism

Occasionally relevant where the role is genuinely specialised, such as graphics or accessibility research.
- Master's
- Doctorate
Teaching, writing or speaking

Someone who explains front-end work publicly usually explains it well internally.
- Conference talks
- Writing
- Workshops

Front-End Developer Certifications and Qualifications

Front-end development has no licensing regime, so every certification here is supporting evidence rather than a filter. Japan is the one market where some of them still carry weight with hiring managers, which is worth knowing about rather than acting on.

None

A certification requirement on a junior front-end posting will cost you far more candidates than it filters.

IPA national examinations

Most informative at this level, and common among domestically trained juniors.
- Fundamental Information Technology Engineer
- Applied Information Technology Engineer
Vendor certifications

Rare at this level and not expected.
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
Accessibility training

A good sign in anyone, at any level.
- IAAP CPACC

None

A certification requirement on a front-end posting in Japan reads as a company that does not know how to assess engineers.

IPA national examinations

They show a candidate studied fundamentals, not that they can ship an interface.
- Fundamental Information Technology Engineer
- Applied Information Technology Engineer
Vendor certifications

Only where your stack genuinely depends on that platform.
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
Accessibility certification

Worth real weight if accessibility is a commercial requirement for your product.
- IAAP CPACC
- IAAP WAS

None

By this level the work speaks and a certification requirement only narrows the field.

Accessibility certification

The one credential that can carry commercial weight, where accessibility is contractual.
- IAAP CPACC
- IAAP WAS
Vendor certifications

Occasionally relevant where the senior owns delivery as well as the front end.
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
IPA national examinations

Rarely informative once there is a decade of work to look at.
- Applied Information Technology Engineer

Calibration

Front-End Developer Levelling

What each level actually means, across three dimensions. Use this before you write the posting: picking a level you cannot pay for, or paying for a level you do not need, is the most expensive mistake available at this stage.

Front-End Developer expectations by level, across domain expertise, technical accomplishments and leadership
	Junior Entry level 0 to 3 years¥4M to ¥6M	Mid-level The market's tightest band 3 to 6 years¥6M to ¥9M	Senior Sets the standard 6 years and up¥9M to ¥14M
Domain expertise What they know	Solid fundamentals in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and working knowledge of one framework. Knows the patterns in your codebase but not yet why they were chosen.	Deep in at least one framework, with real understanding of the browser underneath it. Can reason about performance and accessibility without being prompted.	Framework-independent judgement. Chooses an approach on its trade-offs rather than familiarity, and can explain what the choice will cost in two years.
Technical accomplishments What they have shipped	Completes well-scoped tasks to standard, with review. Ships components and bug fixes. Expect their work to need feedback on edge cases rather than on the happy path.	Owns features end to end, including the parts nobody specified. Extends shared components rather than duplicating them. Their work comes back finished.	Has owned a system through significant change: a migration, a rewrite, or a design system adopted across teams. Can point to what it improved.
Leadership What they do for others	None expected. What you want instead is that they ask early when stuck, and apply review feedback as a rule rather than a one-off correction.	Reviews junior work usefully and mentors informally. Not expected to set direction, but expected to raise a problem with the direction before it is built.	Raises the output of everyone around them through review, standards and mentoring. Represents the front end in planning and says what a proposal really costs.

In the wild

How large companies write the Front-End Developer job description

Real postings, pulled from each company's own careers feed. Use them to sanity-check your wording, and to see how much a big-company posting asks for compared with what you actually need.

Amazon

Sr. Front-End Mobile Engineer, Aza & PXT AI

The most demanding list in the sample, and the clearest structure.

Structure
Split
Duties
19
Must-haves
14
Experience
4+ yrs
Pay
Not shown
- React
- Vue
- JavaScript
- Accessibility
- Performance
Our reading of it

How it is built. Amazon separates the work from the bar in a way almost nobody else does: responsibilities, then a basic qualifications list you are screened against, then a preferred list that is explicitly not required. The basic list runs to fourteen items, which is roughly three times what a company outside the top tier can afford to ask for.

Worth copying. Copy the split. Naming which requirements are a filter and which are a tiebreaker is the single most useful thing this posting does, and it costs nothing.

Leave it there. Do not copy the length. Fourteen must-haves works when a hundred thousand people want to work for you. It reads as a wish list when you are hiring your first front-end engineer in Tokyo.

Read the original posting
Reddit

Staff Frontend Engineer, Ads Creative

Heavy on scope and seniority signals, light on hard filters.

Structure
Split
Duties
9
Must-haves
10 +6 pref
Experience
10+ yrs
Pay
Not shown
- TypeScript
- React
- JavaScript
- Accessibility
- Performance
Our reading of it

How it is built. Responsibilities lean on leading multi-quarter work and operating through ambiguity, and the required list asks for a decade of experience. The preferred list is where the concrete technology lands.

Worth copying. Describing seniority as scope owned rather than years served. That is the right instinct even when the years number is also stated.

Leave it there. Ten or more years as a hard minimum. In the Japanese market that number alone would empty your funnel, and it correlates with very little that matters in front-end work.

Read the original posting
Robinhood

Staff Web Engineer, Legend

A performance-first posting, unusually specific about the work.

Structure
Split
Duties
12
Must-haves
5
Experience
7+ yrs
Pay
Published
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Performance
Our reading of it

How it is built. Responsibilities focus on measurable platform work: profiling, diagnosing, shipping speed improvements. Requirements are short. Pay range published.

Worth copying. Tying the role to a measurable outcome. A responsibility you can put a number against is a responsibility you can interview against and review against later.

Leave it there. Almost no mention of accessibility or testing. Specific does not mean complete, and what a posting leaves out is what the hire will assume is not their job.

Read the original posting
Coinbase

Staff Software Engineer, Frontend (Consumer - Advanced Trading)

Ownership stated well, experience bar stated badly.

Structure
Split
Duties
6
Must-haves
11
Experience
8+ yrs
Pay
Published
- React
- Accessibility
- Performance
- Mentoring
Our reading of it

How it is built. Six responsibilities, each written as something owned end to end rather than a task performed, which is the sharpest responsibility writing in the sample. Then eleven required items opening with an eight-year minimum.

Worth copying. The responsibility phrasing. Every line names a surface the hire owns and where it starts and stops, which is exactly what makes an interview question writable.

Leave it there. Eight years plus expert-level as a hard gate. Two adjectives doing the work that one concrete piece of evidence would do better.

Read the original posting
Palantir

Senior Front End Software Engineer - Application Development

The most complete structure, and the most jargon.

Structure
Split
Duties
10
Must-haves
7 +12 pref
Experience
4+ yrs
Pay
Not shown
- TypeScript
- React
- JavaScript
- Accessibility
- Design systems
Our reading of it

How it is built. Four labelled sections: core responsibilities, the technologies used, what they value, and what they require. Splitting values from requirements is a good idea that almost nobody else in the sample attempts.

Worth copying. Naming the stack in its own section rather than burying it in a requirement. It answers the first question a candidate has without turning the stack into a filter.

Leave it there. The register. The writing assumes the reader already knows what the company means by its own vocabulary, which works when the brand does the selling and fails when it does not.

Read the original posting
Stripe

Frontend Engineer, Payments & Risk

The best-written posting in the sample.

Structure
Split
Duties
11
Must-haves
5
Experience
2+ yrs
Pay
Not shown
- TypeScript
- React
Our reading of it

How it is built. Short. Eleven responsibilities, five minimum requirements, and a preferred list kept genuinely optional. It also tells applicants in plain language that meeting the minimum requirements is enough to apply and that the preferred list is a bonus, which is unusual and worth stealing.

Worth copying. The stated invitation to apply on the minimum requirements alone. It costs one sentence and directly counteracts the self-screening that keeps good candidates out of your pipeline.

Leave it there. The role is described almost entirely in terms of Stripe-scale problems. If your product does not have millions of users, borrowing that framing makes the posting read as aspirational rather than honest.

Read the original posting
Databricks

Senior Software Frontend Engineer – Dashboards

Sells the problem well, defines the bar loosely.

Structure
Split
Duties
6
Must-haves
7 +1 pref
Experience
5+ yrs
Pay
Not shown
- TypeScript
- React
- JavaScript
- Accessibility
- Performance
Our reading of it

How it is built. Framed around the impact the hire will have rather than the tasks they will complete, with the qualifications kept short. Pay range is published, which most of this sample does not do.

Worth copying. Leading with impact, and publishing the range. Both are rare and both help.

Leave it there. The looseness. When the qualifications list is short and abstract, the screening decisions move into the recruiter's head, which is where inconsistency comes from.

Read the original posting
R
Ramp

Software Engineer, Frontend

The shortest, and the friendliest to a candidate who is not already sure.

Structure
One list
Duties
0
Must-haves
7
Experience
2+ yrs
Pay
Published
- React
- JavaScript
- Mentoring
Our reading of it

How it is built. One combined list rather than a responsibilities and requirements split, with a two-year minimum stated as preferred rather than required. Bullets are about half the length of the sample median.

Worth copying. Short bullets and a soft minimum. Both widen the funnel at no cost to the quality of the shortlist.

Leave it there. Combining the lists. When everything sits together, a candidate cannot tell what will actually screen them out, so the cautious ones screen themselves out instead.

Read the original posting

Facts only, taken from each posting: the title, the years it states, the technologies it names and whether it shows pay. The wording stays on their site, where it belongs, so every card links to the original. Postings expire, so a dead link means that role has closed. Last collected 19 August 2026.

Before you publish

What a Front-End Developer job advert must say in Japan

A job advert in Japan is not free text. The law sets a floor for what it has to tell a candidate, and that floor moved in April 2024.

1

State the terms in the advert itself

Article 5-3 requires whoever is recruiting to clearly indicate the substance of the work, and the wages, working hours and other conditions. It binds the party running the advert, not only the eventual employer.
Employment Security Act, Article 5-3
2

Keep it accurate and current

Accuracy is the obligation, not a courtesy. A posting still running on last year's band, or one that quietly assumes a bonus, is the problem the rule exists to catch.
Read the Act on e-Gov
3

Say how far the job could move
New, 1 April 2024
The scope of possible future changes to duties and to place of work is now part of what has to be set out. "Tokyo, front-end development" is no longer enough on its own if either could change later.
What changed in April 2024
4

Spell out fixed-term conditions
New, 1 April 2024
If the contract is fixed term, that includes any limit on renewals and the route to indefinite-term conversion. Most front-end roles here are permanent, which is exactly why teams forget this one when they hire a contractor.
What you must state when recruiting
5

Write it so the offer letter can repeat it

The advert and the eventual written conditions should say the same thing without correction. The gap between the two is where disputes start, and it is the part a candidate remembers.

Official sources

Employment Security Act, Article 5-3 Ministry of Justice, English translation
The Act as currently in force e-Gov, Japanese
The rules that changed in April 2024 Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
What you must state when recruiting Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, PDF

This is what the law requires you to publish, not legal advice. For the working-conditions wording that ends up in the contract itself, SaiyouTeam works with licensed Japanese professionals: a labour and social security attorney, or a lawyer.

Frequently asked

Questions about hiring a Front-End Developer in Japan

What should a front-end developer job description include?

Seven things, in this order: a two-line company introduction, the mission stated as an outcome rather than a task list, five to eight responsibilities written as deliverables you can verify at interview, three to five mandatory qualifications, a short preferred list, an annual salary band, and the working conditions Japan expects you to disclose. Anything beyond that reduces applications rather than improving their quality, because a candidate already in a job stops reading.

How do you assess whether a candidate fits a front-end developer job description?

Score against the mandatory qualifications only, and score each on evidence rather than impression. Ask what they shipped, at what scale, and what broke: a component library other teams adopted, a measurable change in Largest Contentful Paint, an accessibility fix that came out of a real audit. Preferred qualifications should never break a tie on their own. If a requirement cannot be tested in an interview, it is a preference in disguise.

What is a typical front-end developer career profile in Japan?

Most arrive by one of three routes: a web production background moving from markup into application work, a general software engineering start that specialised into the browser, or a design-adjacent route through UI implementation. Junior sits at roughly one to three years, mid at three to six, senior beyond six with ownership of architecture and of other people's output. Changing company every three to four years is normal and is not the negative signal it would be in an older Japanese firm.

How many years of experience should I ask for?

State a band, not a floor, and keep it around three years wide. Almost every large-company posting does the opposite: in a sample of thirty-three, the stated minimum is nearly always "N or more years", most often two or five. A precise minimum filters out strong candidates in a market this small, because a good engineer with two years of focused component work will outperform a weak one with six. If the role genuinely needs someone who has carried a rewrite or owned a design system, say that instead: it describes the evidence you want rather than the time served.

Should a front-end developer job description in Japan specify a framework?

Name the stack you run, but keep the framework preferred rather than mandatory unless the hire has to be productive in week one. React and Vue dominate here, with Vue notably more common in Japan than in the US or Europe. A strong React developer picks up Vue in a few weeks, so making the specific framework mandatory can remove half your pool for a gap that closes inside a probation period.

What salary should I put in a front-end developer job description in Japan?

As a broad guide for Tokyo: junior around ¥4M to ¥6M, mid-level ¥6M to ¥9M, senior ¥9M to ¥14M, with bilingual and product-company roles at the upper end and agency or SIer roles lower. Publish it as an annual figure, say whether it assumes a fixed overtime allowance, and say how many months of bonus are included. A figure that quietly assumes a full bonus reads as a bait number when the offer arrives. Then add one line on what decides where an offer lands in the band. A study of close to ten million postings found that wide ranges deter applicants, women more than men, and that naming the typical starting figure and the criteria behind it closes most of that gap. A four million yen spread with no explanation asks the candidate to guess whether the posting is for them.

Is a job advert in Japan legally required to state the working conditions?

Yes. Article 5-3 of the Employment Security Act requires whoever is recruiting to clearly indicate the substance of the work and the wages, working hours and other conditions, kept accurate and current, and since 1 April 2024 that includes how far duties and place of work could change later. The five things a compliant advert has to cover are set out above.

Do I need to state Japanese level and visa sponsorship?

Yes, both, explicitly. These two lines size your candidate pool before a single technical requirement is read. Describe the language situation rather than naming a JLPT level: daily stand-up in Japanese, specifications in Japanese, customer meetings in Japanese. Silence on sponsorship is read as no by candidates who need it and as yes by those who hope for it, which costs you applicants at the top of the funnel and wastes time further down.

What is the difference between a job description and a role profile?

The job description is the advertisement: what you publish to attract applications. The role profile is the internal definition behind it: the full set of technical and non-technical duties at industry standard, the competencies that predict contribution, and the expectations at each level. You write the job description from the role profile by deciding which duties this hire owns and which requirements are genuinely non-negotiable.

Job description samples for roles similar to Front-End Developer

Other roles in the Software Engineering family. Each will have its own template, samples and role profile.