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Motorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform, connecting private sellers with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Founded in 2017 and backed by leading technology investors (£143M Series C), the company is at a critical growth phase.
You'll join as a Staff Frontend Engineer to lead technically across the frontend engineering organization. Working across cross-functional squads (engineers, designers, data analysts, product managers), you'll resolve engineering problems that span teams, prevent systemic risks, and shape product and business strategy with technical and commercial awareness.
Motorway is TypeScript-first, using React, SCSS, Next.js, Express, Vitest, and Chromatic. As a Staff engineer, you'll bring deep expertise in modern web technologies and frameworks, drive consistency across all web properties, and lead migration efforts to keep the stack current—not just bumping versions, but leveraging new capabilities. You'll define and lead the AI engineering practice on the frontend, setting standards for agent execution environments, quality harnesses, and guardrail architecture.
Key responsibilities include: shipping features end-to-end with accessible, performant components; authoring API contracts and technical roadmaps with rigorous written framing; driving consistency and leading migrations across web properties; owning quality, security, and reliability standards (CSP, XSS prevention, data governance); understanding and improving the build and deployment pipeline; developing IC3 engineers into technical leaders; and leading AI-assisted engineering practices using tools like Kiro.
Motorway recognizes the value of AI tools and agents to accelerate work, providing engineers access to the latest models. You'll set standards for how the team integrates AI into everyday workflow and products.
REQUIREMENTS:
Minimum:
- 5+ years of focused frontend practice 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 making difficult technical decisions under uncertainty
- Recognized as a technical authority in frontend engineering; engineers and product stakeholders seek your direction
- Deep expertise with modern CSS/SCSS, HTML, and current ECMAScript proposals; strong understanding of framework trade-offs
- Comprehensive experience writing unit and E2E tests and building CI workflows
- Deep working knowledge of TypeScript and modern React (hooks, component composition, transitions) and frameworks like Next.js
- Breadth across different teams with pragmatic build-vs-refactor-vs-replace judgment informed by production crises and scale challenges
- Genuine interest in leading AI-assisted development
Preferred:
- Experience owning and maintaining a design system and driving adoption across teams
- Ability to create sensible UI designs without a Designer for non-trivial work
- Deep experience with observability, Core Web Vitals, accessibility auditing, and frontend performance tuning
- Experience evaluating vendors and third-party tools with clear technical and commercial criteria
- Experience maintaining and evolving complex legacy systems at scale
- Backend fluency; comfortable following requests into the API layer and shaping contracts on both sides
