(Remote) Lead Front-End Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead Frontend Engineer to set the technical direction for Ember’s frontend while building products used by passengers, drivers and internal teams. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a line management role. You’ll own how our frontend works: architecture, framework choices, component patterns, styling, testing, performance, accessibility and maintainability.

Most of your work will be hands-on frontend product development, across customer-facing products and the internal tools that run our operation. We’re a small team and our best projects often cross boundaries, so you should be happy making small backend changes or touching our apps, when that’s the cleanest way to solve the problem.

We're building the future of public transport — convenient, affordable, connected and zero-emission. Our goal is to make it easier and more enjoyable to get from A to B with Ember than it is with your own car. Ember is a tech company, not a traditional bus operator. This allows us to use electric buses more intensively than anyone else in the world, leading to a massive reduction in emissions. It also helps us provide a much better passenger experience, with innovative features like demand-responsive stops.

We’re still tiny, with a handful of routes and ~100 buses. We’ve recently raised a Series A from some of Europe’s leading climate VCs and are looking for mission-driven individuals who want to get on board and help take us to the next level. We don’t have dedicated product managers — you’ll help decide what we build, how it should work and what scope is worth pursuing.

AI tools have changed how we work and what one person can do. We expect you to use them heavily and thoughtfully: exploring unfamiliar code, writing tests, migrating repetitive patterns and moving from idea to working implementation faster. The leverage is real, but only if you have the engineering judgement to know when the output is good and when it is wrong.

Our tech stack includes:

• Most frontend work is in React and TypeScript.
• Styling is authored directly with CSS via styled-components.
• We use Gatsby, Jest and Playwright today, though part of the role is shaping where the frontend stack should go next.
• Backend services include Python, Postgres, Redis, ClickHouse and Kafka, deployed on AWS with Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Docker and ECS.

You’ll split your time between product development and frontend platform work. That might mean improving booking flows, implementing a website redesign, helping passengers better understand disruption, or building internal tools. On the platform side, you’ll raise the quality of our frontend and make it easier for everyone else to work in. Planning and executing large architectural changes, such as a migration away from Gatsby.

Taking responsibility for frontend quality, including CI build times, Web Vitals, Sentry errors, bundle sizes and accessibility. Building our own component library and migrating away from Kiwi Orbit and styled-components where that clearly makes sense. Making sure we reuse high-quality components rather than reimplementing the same thing in slightly different ways. Raising the frontend bar through feedback, clear standards, good tooling and quality control, including exploring how review agents can catch issues like duplicated components, design-system drift, avoidable bundle growth and layout problems solved in CSS.

We care about the details that make software feel obvious, reliable and hard to misuse. Sometimes it means deciding that a small backend change is better than more frontend complexity.

Diversity and equality: At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave.

You will receive a salary of £70,000–£110,000 per annum, depending on your experience and skills, plus share options. You'll also have access to frontier AI models with generous usage limits. You'll be expected to work from our office in central Edinburgh most days — we value in-person communication — but there's flexibility around the odd day from home.

If you have code from a project you’ve worked on, or something you’ve built that shows your frontend judgement, please send that too. You should want to get involved early in Ember’s growth story, with a real opportunity to shape how we build frontend software. You have excellent frontend fundamentals. React and TypeScript matter, but so do CSS, layout, browser behaviour, performance and accessibility.

You view AI as a force multiplier and have changed how you work because of it, raising the quality and ambition of what you build. You are comfortable making small, well-scoped backend changes when that is cleaner than adding frontend complexity.