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Spare is a fast-growing startup in the transit industry. The AI Platform team sits at the center of Spare's product, owning shared services and Nutshell, Spare's design system. These systems support millions of AI voice calls annually and help tens of thousands of people access transportation.
As a Senior Frontend Engineer, you will turn the Design team's direction into the product people actually use. You'll own the technical decisions that keep interfaces accessible, fast, and well-organized in code, enabling other engineers and AI workflows to build on them with proper guardrails.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own and extend Nutshell: tokens, shared components, and patterns that other teams build with
- Refactor existing frontend where necessary, creating a highly organized environment and setting UI foundations for emerging products
- Shape the system so engineers and AI agents produce accessible, consistent UI by default
- Fill in gaps that don't get explicitly designed: empty states, keyboard behavior, screens under real operational load
- Enable people who build on your work through documentation, feedback, and workshops to drive adoption
You'll work on dense, data-heavy interfaces used by transit agencies worldwide—dispatchers watching live vehicles, planners modeling service, schedulers building driver shifts. Real consequences when something is hard to use.
The team is cross-functional: developers, a product manager, and designers doing customer-facing work with real human impact. Developers at Spare talk to customers, make design decisions, and own problems from discovery through shipped solutions. AI has expanded what a single developer can deliver.
Location: Hybrid in Downtown Vancouver, three days per week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday).
Requirements:
- Track record building data-dense interfaces (complex operational UI, not marketing sites)
- Deep knowledge of React, TypeScript, modern CSS, and component API design
- Experience getting a design system adopted—a component library other engineers depend on, with buy-in to get it used
- Ability to work across the stack (carry features past frontend, but interface remains your specialty)
- Curiosity about AI-assisted development (don't need to be expert, but already experimenting and can explain decisions in shipped code)
- Clear communication, comfortable with design and product teams, able to write documentation people actually read
- High bar and real ownership: ambitious standards, proactive communication, drive to move without waiting for direction
- Depth of experience matters more than year count; typically 5+ years
Nice to have:
- Experience in transit, mobility, or logistics
- Experience at high-growth startup at similar stage
- Comfort working in design tooling alongside designers
- Experience coaching other engineers without formal title
