Senior Design Engineer, 13+ years. I run the research, draw the flows, decide how a screen behaves when things go wrong, then write the React and TypeScript that ships it. Mostly fintech, digital assets and AI products.
Most products have a seam in them. It sits where the design stops and the engineering starts, and you can usually feel it: the state nobody drew, the animation that snaps, the error message written by whoever reached it last. I have spent 13+ years working both sides of that seam so it does not show.
In practice I run the research and the flows, make the interface and motion decisions, build the design system, then write the React and TypeScript that puts it in front of people. Fintech, institutional digital assets, enterprise platforms and now AI products. Five of those years were spent in London, and I work from Abu Dhabi now.
“A design that stops at the mockup is a proposal. Somebody still has to decide what happens on a slow connection.”
Not three services you can buy separately. Three stages of the same job, which is exactly why none of it ever gets handed over.
Talking to the people who will actually use the thing, mapping the flows, and settling how every state behaves before a line of production code exists. Keyboard paths and contrast get decided here, while they are still cheap to change.
Tokens, components, typography and motion, plus the loading and empty states nobody remembers to draw. Built as typed, versioned code so the system is something engineers can use rather than something they have to translate.
Shipping it in React, TypeScript and Next.js, then holding it to the performance and testing standards that keep it quick once real data, real content and real traffic show up.
How a change actually moves: discovery → flows → options → judgement → build → polish. Agents compress the middle, drafting six versions of a screen in the time it used to take to draw one. What they do not do is sit with a user, notice the hesitation, or decide which version earns its place. That part stays mine, start to finish.
Sit with users, frame the real problem
Map the paths, the states, the edge cases
Agents draft directions in parallel
I choose the direction and the detail
Production React, design system, motion
Spacing, easing, a11y, performance
A pragmatic, deep toolset rather than a buzzword list. These are the things I reach for first, and the supporting cast around them.
Four rules that hold whether I'm arguing about a sixteen-pixel gap or rewriting the component underneath it. They are what separates a product people put up with from one they actually reach for.
A mockup is a proposal. The real work is everything it left out: the loading state, the empty state, the error nobody planned for, and what happens when the connection drops halfway through.
Spacing, rhythm, easing curves and focus order are not decoration. They are the difference between software people tolerate and software people trust, so they get written down like anything else.
Contrast, keyboard paths and semantics get settled while the thing is still a drawing. Retrofitting them into a shipped component costs several times more and never comes out as clean.
Agents can generate ten versions of a screen before lunch. Not one of them knows which version is right, and that gap is widening rather than closing. The scarce thing was never the typing.
Thirteen years across fintech, digital assets, banking and AI. Five of them in the UK, most of the rest in the UAE. Design and frontend in every role.
Responsible for the whole product experience at an agentic AI platform for building and energy management. Research, interface, design system and the React that ships it all sit with one person.
Frontend lead on a regulated investment and trading platform built in React and TypeScript.
Institutional digital asset and custody platform, including ClearLoop and the risk dashboards.
Customer-facing web products for Sky UK, delivered inside an agile team.
Enterprise digital products across banking, retail, energy and automotive.
Agency work, positioned between the design studio and the engineering team.
Design and frontend in a single role on a distributed team. The first job where I did both, and the reason I still do.
Four years of freelance product work for startups and small businesses around the world.
I'm open to design engineering roles and selective consulting. If your product works but still feels like it was assembled by two teams who never spoke, that is the problem I enjoy most.