Product Design Leader · Design Systems · Front-End Engineering
Product design leader with a decade-long foundation as a full-stack engineer, specializing in complex, data-heavy products. I eliminate the friction between design and engineering by designing and building in a single loop, delivering working prototypes rather than static mockups. Looking for a role with complex problems, true ownership, and direct impact on the work.
Experience
Director of Product Design
Censys | Sep 2025 – Present (Fully Remote)
Design lead for the Censys Internet Intelligence Platform ($63M ARR, growing 69% year over year), which unifies Attack Surface Management and Search into a single product built on the industry’s largest Global Internet Map. I own design for the AI and data intelligence surfaces and lead three designers at senior, staff, and principal level across the rest.
Designed Censys Investigations, an agentic framework that makes senior-level investigation available to anyone on a security team. Users direct it at a problem; it runs hours of expert pivots across the Internet Map and returns cited evidence with the reproducible query behind every finding. Architected as an expanding skill set rather than a single feature. First skill shipped in beta as IOC Investigator.
Led the information architecture for unifying two mature products into one platform, folding ASM in as Exposure Management, making room for new lines like Supply Chain Intelligence, and reaching feature parity to retire the legacy Search product in September 2026.
Designed the self-serve growth surface end to end: unauthenticated platform preview, registration, Google Auth, credit UX, and auto-replenish. Self-serve revenue more than doubled and MAUs grew 84% across three quarters.
Owned the enterprise readiness suite that large security organizations require before they can buy: SCIM provisioning, MFA, audit logging, self-service account deletion, and role-aware insights.
Replaced the team’s Figma workflow with an AI-driven pipeline: Lovable for low and mid-fidelity exploration, then Claude Design with custom skills and Claude Code to build against our design system, carrying an idea from discovery to near production-ready front-end code.
Led design direction for Censys Assistant, the platform’s conversational AI layer, plus Reputation Score, Threat Actor Z-Score, ICS/OT Critical Infrastructure, and Investigation Manager. Set the approach and reviewed the craft; the team owned execution.
Grew the design function to four, established its critique and research practice, and coached the team to a first-place hackathon finish.
Director of User Experience (UX)
DNSFilter | Oct 2021 – Sep 2025 (Fully Remote)
Hands-on design lead for a DNS security platform protecting 45,000+ organizations and resolving 200B queries daily, with a design team of two.
Designed and built a custom UX research agent on n8n and Gemini with a Jira integration, turning prior research, support tickets, and usage data into pressure-tested problem briefs so discovery started from evidence instead of assumption.
Appointed to DNSFilter’s AI committee on the strength of it and asked to take the practice company-wide, training sales, support, marketing, engineering, and product teams to scope, build, and evaluate their own agents.
Designed the Roaming Client management overhaul, Universal Allow and Block Lists, and the integrations suite, the three initiatives behind DNSFilter’s 41% revenue growth in 2024.
Architected and co-built DNSFilter’s internal design system in React: 80 production components, design tokens, and documentation adopted by three product teams and roughly 25 engineers.
Built a UX scorecard grading 24 red routes and their jobs to be done on task success, time-on-task, and error rate, converting “the UX feels off” into a ranked, fundable backlog reviewed quarterly in formal business reviews.
Senior Director of User Experience (UX)
The Aspen Group (TAG) | Nov 2020 – Oct 2021 (Chicago, IL - Hybrid Remote)
Led design for the patient experience across four brands in a national healthcare group serving millions of patients a year: Aspen Dental, Motto Clear Aligners, ClearChoice, and Chapter Aesthetic Studio.
Designed a patient financing experience that lifted in-practice approval rates from 60% to 99% and expanded lender options from 3 to 20, putting treatment within reach for patients who would previously have been declined.
Built end-to-end customer journey maps for Aspen Dental, Motto, and Chapter, running the research directly alongside the agency partner and translating findings into a roadmap adopted by Product.
Owned the shared front-end component library behind the group’s patient-facing web experiences.
Directed a branding agency through Motto’s public site and scheduling experience, and managed the designer behind Aspen Dental’s office landing pages and scheduling interface.
Director of UX & Application Innovation
Hitachi Solutions | Feb 2018 – Nov 2020 (Chicago, IL - Fully Remote)
Founded and led Hitachi’s North American UX practice from zero to a team of six, winning and delivering custom software engagements across healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and financial services.
Stayed billable at 60 to 80% while running the practice, personally delivering one to two client engagements at a time, primarily in healthcare and insurance.
Led design system workshops for clients and built a brand-derived system into every application engagement, making design systems a standard part of delivery rather than an upsell.
Delivered 15+ engagements from discovery through production hand-off for clients including biBERK (Berkshire Hathaway), MVP Health Care, IDEX, and UL, plus Teams-integrated applications designed for Microsoft.
User Experience (UX) Lead
Paylocity | Jan 2015 – Feb 2018 (Schaumburg, IL - Hybrid Remote)
Joined a newly public HCM company as a full-stack engineer and was recruited onto the central UX team, which grew from 20 to 30 as the business scaled from mid-size to enterprise.
Brought on specifically to close the design-to-implementation gap, with production commit access alongside design ownership.
Architected and shipped Citrus, Paylocity’s first internal design system: framework-agnostic components, design tokens, pattern library, and documentation, adopted across all 20 product teams.
Designed and shipped production front-end for Web Benefits, Web Time, and Analytics, the company’s insurance, scheduling, and complex reporting products, owning the work from first sketch through merged PR.
Nominated to Paylocity’s selective internal leadership program and promoted to UX Lead on completion.
Senior Developer | Fanatics Inc. | Apr 2014 – Jan 2015 (Chicago, IL - Onsite)
Developer | Millennium Information Services, Inc. | Mar 2012 – Apr 2014 (Chicago, IL - Onsite)
Associate Software Engineer | Arc Worldwide / Leo Burnett | Feb 2011 – Mar 2012 (Chicago, IL - Onsite)
Software Engineer | American Concrete Pavement Association | Jun 2006 – Feb 2011 (Rosemont, IL - Onsite)
Tools and Skills
DESIGN
Claude Design, Lovable, Figma, design systems, design tokens, atomic design, prototyping
ENGINEERING
Claude Code, Cursor, React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Node.js, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, REST
AI PRACTICE
Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, n8n, agent design and evaluation, workflow integration, prompt and context design
RESEARCH & ANALYTICS
Pendo, Canny, UserTesting, UserZoom, Maze, Hotjar, continuous discovery, usability testing
INDUSTRIES
Healthcare, Cybersecurity, Insurance, Financial Services, Human Capital Management, Manufacturing, eCommerce
Recognition
G2 Best Usability Award, DNSFilter, won while leading UX
AI Champion Award, DNSFilter Unleashing Innovation Hackathon
Panelist, Scaling UX in the Enterprise, IxDA
Design Sprint Master Class Certification, AJ&Smart