Staff Frontend Engineer
Staff Frontend Engineer at Motorway, the UK's largest online car-selling marketplace, leading technical direction across frontend squads: shipping features, owning API contracts and roadmaps, driving consistency and migrations, setting security/reliability standards, and leading AI-assisted engineering. Stack is TypeScript-first: React, Next.js, Express, SCSS, Vitest, Chromatic.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Frontend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years of focused frontend experience building and operating production web applications at scale, with a track record of leading large, complex projects
- Ability to bridge engineering and product fluently, translating between business priorities and technical constraints, and defend difficult technical decisions through reasoning
- Recognised as a technical authority in frontend engineering whose judgement shapes decisions beyond the immediate team
- Deep expertise with modern CSS/SCSS, HTML, and current ECMAScript proposals, plus understanding of framework trade-offs
- Comprehensive experience writing unit and E2E tests and building CI workflows to exercise them
- Deep working knowledge of TypeScript and modern React (hooks, component composition, transitions), and frameworks like Next.js for SSR, routing, and data fetching
- Breadth across different teams with pragmatic build-vs-refactor-vs-replace judgement from production crises and scale challenges
- Genuine interest in leading AI-assisted development as part of personal and team workflow
Nice to have
- Experience owning and maintaining a design system and driving its adoption across multiple teams
- Ability to create sensible UI designs without a Designer for non-trivial work when resource-constrained
- Deep experience with observability, Core Web Vitals, accessibility auditing, and frontend performance tuning
- Experience evaluating vendors and third-party tools and making build-vs-buy recommendations with technical and commercial criteria
- Experience maintaining and evolving complex legacy systems at scale
- Backend fluency — comfortable following a request into the API layer and shaping contracts on both sides
Full description
About Motorway
Motorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform. We connect private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Our online platform helps sellers achieve great prices for their cars while giving dealers fast, reliable access to the stock they want for their dealerships. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding.
This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better.
We're looking for a Staff Frontend Engineer to help lead technically across our frontend engineering. You'll work across a group of cross-functional squads, each made up of engineers, designers, data analysts and a product manager, helping them move quickly and safely, resolving the engineering problems that span teams before they compound into systemic risk, and shaping product and business strategy with a technically-grounded, commercially-aware point of view.
We're a TypeScript-first organisation. Our frontend stack is TypeScript and React, styled with SCSS, server-side rendered with Next.js and Express, and tested with Vitest & Chromatic. As a Staff engineer you'll bring deep expertise with the latest native web technologies and modern frameworks, drive consistency across all of our web properties, and lead the migration efforts that keep our stack current, not just bumping versions, but making use of the new capabilities each release brings and helping the wider department do the same.
At Motorway, we know the importance of delivering high-quality, valuable solutions quickly, and we recognise the ability for AI tools and agents to accelerate our work. We provide our engineers with access to the latest models through Kiro. As a Staff engineer you'll define and lead our AI engineering practice on the frontend, setting standards for agent execution environments, quality harnesses, and guardrail architecture - and build a team norm where domain depth, AI-enabled breadth, and rigorous feedback-loop design are treated as complementary.
What you'll be doing
- Ship features end to end: Own meaningful pieces of product work from design handoff through to production, building accessible, performant components, wiring them into applications, and shipping them with confidence.
- Author the contracts and the roadmap: Author and own API contracts and documentation for the department, and maintain a technical roadmap with rigorous written framing - precise intent, explicit trade-offs, and unambiguous success criteria - setting the documentation and spec-writing standard for the area.
- : Drive consistency across all our web properties, design the standards the department builds on, and lead migration efforts - making full use of new framework features and bringing the rest of engineering along with you.