Product designer, 10 years. I design products where the complexity is real but invisible to the people who depend on them.
A comment section seems simple until you’re the moderator triaging hundreds of flagged comments during a breaking news event. A pay stub seems simple until you’re the tipped worker trying to figure out whether you got paid correctly. A job application seems simple until you’re filling it out on your phone between shifts and the offer expires in 24 hours.
I’ve spent most of my career in these moments: the places where complicated rules, real stakes, and limited time collide, and the people using the tools can’t afford to be confused.
For nearly eight years, I was a founding and then principal designer at Coral, a commenting and community platform that started as a collaboration between Mozilla, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. I helped build the moderation infrastructure, the AI-assisted toxicity detection, and the design system that scaled to 120+ newsrooms in 23 languages. After Coral was acquired by Vox Media, I expanded into publishing tools, editorial workflows, and sports community design across brands including The Verge, New York Magazine, and SB Nation.
Now I design and build independently. rssHQ is a recruiting platform I built from the ground up for a staffing company I’ve partnered with since 2017. Check My Checks is a wage verification tool for tipped restaurant workers. Both are built with AI coding partners, and both reflect the same instinct: find the complexity hiding in something people interact with every day, then design so they don’t have to think about it.
Before any of this, I went to law school. I didn’t practice, but it keeps showing up in the work: compliance logic, audit trail architecture, the instinct that people with the least power should get the most clarity. It’s less a credential and more a lens I keep discovering new uses for.
I also spent three years mentoring career-transitioning designers at Bloc. Past students now work at Microsoft, Apple, Fidelity, CarMax, and Flickr. Teaching sharpened my ability to explain design decisions clearly, which turns out to be one of the most useful skills a principal designer can have.
Outside of product work, I wrote, produced, and acted in “Theys of Our Lives,” a semi-autobiographical short film currently in post-production. The same through-line runs through all of it: using craft to create access and representation for people underserved by existing systems.