I started in front-end engineering and kept drifting toward the design underneath it. Here's the path that turned into a design-systems career — and what each stop taught me.
Graduated from UW with a B.S. in Informatics and a B.A. in English Literature, and shipped a browser-based visual novel about living with invisible illness.
The English degree was never a detour. Writing and structure turned out to be the same instinct that would later pull me toward design systems.
Won Informatics Best Project 2019. Co-authored a user-centered design paper along the way — the design thread was there from the start.
Built front-end features for LivelyLink, a React Native app caregivers use to monitor senior health. Stood up the app’s Storybook component library from scratch with a designer.
Building a component library from nothing, sitting next to a designer, is where I first stopped seeing engineering and design as two separate jobs.
Fixed a company-wide accessibility bug in React Navigation that had no documented workaround, and published the fix org-wide.
Led UI development on enterprise internal products in Visa’s Acceptance Solutions org. Stepped into the UI lead role and shipped 3 major releases across complex legacy systems.
Inheriting a pile of undocumented legacy code taught me the lesson that still shapes how I work: the kindest thing you can ship is documentation.
Migrated 4 products from a shared monolith to independent repos, and drove accessibility practices across the team — recognized by management as a force multiplier.
Earned a UX/UI Design certificate and ran two solo, end-to-end case studies — research through high-fidelity prototype — bringing accessibility annotations in from day one.
Designing the accessibility annotations from day one wasn’t a checkbox. It was me trying to be the kind of designer I wished I’d been handed specs from.
Coming from engineering, I designed the handoffs I wish I’d been given.
Building and maintaining the public Visa Product Design System at design.visa.com — 14,000+ users, serving design consistency and front-end across the org. I design and build, end to end.
The throughline turned out to be simple: make the next person’s work easier than mine was. Every role since has been a variation on that.
Took the system public: shipped the code switcher, page actions, and the Patterns code tab; closed 10 of 10 security findings; held 100% uptime.