AaronWentt

Staff Frontend Engineer

Embeddable applications,
web components & design systems
Washington, DC

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I build software for environments I don’t control: third-party embeds that live inside other people’s websites, component libraries consumed by teams I’ve never met, and the design systems that keep ten applications speaking one visual language.

Fifteen years in, my instincts come from agency work in CMS-heavy environments, where nothing ships into a clean slate. I’ve managed engineers and led teams, and that experience shapes how I mentor and drive technical decisions, but my best work happens when I’m deep in the code.

Now

Leading Apollo, Xplor Technologies’ cross-brand design system and web component library: architecture, CSS strategy, design tokens across five platforms, and the CI/CD that holds it together. Onboarding teams to it, one at a time.

Currently building out Apollo's AI-assisted development infrastructure: making documentation machine-readable, writing Cursor rules and custom commands for component workflows, and encoding best practices into automated review tooling so AI collaborators meet the same bar as human contributors.

An essay on making a design system legible to AI agents, not just developers, is in progress.

Work

2023 – Present

Staff Software Engineer · Xplor Technologies

Lead engineer for Apollo, a Stencil.js design system shipped as nine npm packages spanning React, Vue, Angular, and framework-agnostic foundations, serving ~10 applications across multiple product lines. Built Growth Hub, a third-party web component wrapping host apps in Shadow DOM for authentication and cross-app navigation. PKCE auth bridged through a cross-origin iframe token exchange, with Apollo's own design tokens bundled in for style isolation. Planned and led migration of Brandbot's conditions-builder to a reusable web component for internal and third-party use. Built Transactional Messaging in Remix (later forked to create Feedback UI). Built the AI-assisted development infrastructure: machine-readable docs, Cursor rules, and review tooling. AI coding assistants produce AI coding assistants produce Apollo-conformant work by default.

2018 – 2023

Senior Engineer → EM → Staff Engineer · Mariana Tek by Xplor

Designed Web Integrations: a React application inside an iframe, orchestrated by a vanilla JS shell using Zoid with a custom router passing state between contexts via query params, letting boutique fitness studios embed scheduling, booking, and account management directly into their existing websites. Tech lead for two applications, then manager of a team of three front-end and full-stack engineers focused on the Admin application, then a deliberate return to Staff IC work.

2012 – 2018

Front-end Developer · Blue State Digital, LookThink

Agency years: Angular applications for the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and Barrick Mining Corp at LookThink; ExpressionEngine-based client sites for the Rockefeller Foundation and the Communications Workers of America at Blue State Digital, the shop behind both Obama campaigns’ digital infrastructure. Where the coexist-with-other-people’s-code instinct comes from.

Elsewhere