---
title: "Spera"
description: "Founding design engineer leading design, frontend, and interaction for a platform where traders own the full loop — design, backtest, paper trade, iterate"
---

# Spera

> Founding design engineer leading design, frontend, and interaction for a platform where traders own the full loop — design, backtest, paper trade, iterate

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Role | Founding Design Engineer · Design Lead |
| When | 2026, ongoing |
| Kind | AI |
| State | In progress |

Spera is the faster path from idea to live strategy: build, backtest, and paper trade your own crypto strategy without sharing your edge, waiting weeks, or managing servers. AI helps go from idea to tested in hours. Leading end-to-end product experience — the visual Logic Deck (ordered steps, not spaghetti), reproducible backtests with pinned data and honest fees/slippage, AI-assisted drafting where every suggestion is a visible row you can accept or reject, and run manifests so every decision is logged. Built for serious strategy builders who are tired of the hire-a-developer loop.

## What I built

- Visual Logic Deck — strategies as ordered steps, drag to reorder
- Reproducible backtests with pinned datasets and versioned logic
- AI inline drafts — visible suggestions, your edge stays yours
- Paper trading flow (live execution in private build)
- Run manifests and full audit trail
- Walk-forward and overfitting-aware validation

## Impact

Full design-to-ship loop for strategy builders — no developer handoffs

### Hard parts

- Making systematic trading approachable without dumbing it down
- Designing AI assistance that accelerates without hiding logic
- Owning design and frontend as founding design engineer on a pre-release product

### What it taught

- Product design for operator-grade fintech tooling
- Compressing the design → backtest → iterate loop into hours
- Building trust through reproducibility and inspectable AI

## Stack

Next.js, TypeScript, Figma, Design Systems, Interaction Design, Frontend, Product Design

## Numbers

From the full case, Spera (Feb 2026 – now). A workspace to build, backtest and paper trade crypto strategies without hiring a developer. I lead its design and its frontend.

- **334** commits to Spera's production frontend, Feb to Sep 2026
- **235** semantic design tokens
- **180+** component specs (47 added from Jul to Sep)
- **1,100+** hard-coded px sizes moved to named type tokens
- **6** automated design checks in CI

### My commits a month, 2026

| Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 18 | 15 | 22 | 54 | 69 | 94 | 61 |

August is the peak: instrument chrome, gold means metered, the AI dock and MCP sign-in.

## Versions

1. **v1, Feb 2026: Strategy graph.** Nodes and wires: the first authoring surface.
2. **v2, Aug 2026: Logic Deck.** Ordered steps, dragged into place and read top to bottom.
3. **v3, Aug 2026: Gold means metered.** Gold marks what costs a run; caveats wait for the Run press.
4. **Shipped, Sep 2026: Keep or revert.** The AI proposes; every change is a row you keep or revert. (the one that shipped best)
5. **Brand, 2026: The mark.** A swallow, a rising moon and a rocket in one shape.

## Facts of the case

- Role: Founding design engineer and design lead: design and frontend, end to end
- Team: Team of three
- Where: Web app, and Spera cards inside AI assistants (MCP)
- Stack: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Framer Motion, Figma
- When: Feb 2026 – now · Alpha, v0.6.94

## Pictures

![A loose pencil sketch of the Spera mark: a swallow in flight inside a circle.](https://www.kiruk.in/work/spera/kept-sketch.webp)

The sketch that was kept: a swallow, a rising moon and a rocket in one shape.

![An early Spera landing page on a gold field, with the logo top left and a dark button top right.](https://www.kiruk.in/work/spera/first-draft.webp)

The first draft of the site, before gold came to mean metered.

## On the 1970 tube

In the site's 1970 era this work plays as a small moving picture. A price chart draws itself candle by candle while a backtest runs under it; the pointer is a crosshair that reads the price.

## Links

- [Live site](https://www.spera.bot)
- [Source](https://github.com/arunkumaarsrinivasan)
- [This work on the site](https://www.kiruk.in/work/spera-platform)
- [All work, as markdown](https://www.kiruk.in/work.md)