AaronWentt

Staff Frontend Engineer

Embeddable applications,
web components & design systems
Washington, DC

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 that work — 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, review tooling — so 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 app inside an iframe, orchestrated by a vanilla JS shell using Zoid with a custom router passing state via query params — letting boutique fitness studios embed scheduling and booking directly into their own websites. Led a team of three, then chose the IC track back.

2012 – 2018

Front-end Developer · Blue State Digital, LookThink

Agency years: client work for the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Institute of Architects, and the digital shop behind both Obama campaigns. Where the coexist-with-other-people’s-code instinct comes from.

Elsewhere