About

I’m Steven. I’ve been designing and building interfaces for about fifteen years, and for the last several I’ve been mostly working on the parts of a product that other parts get built on top of.

What I actually do

I sit somewhere between product designer and front-end engineer. The best short description is design engineer. What I build is the shared interface infrastructure that lets product teams turn design decisions into dependable software — components, tokens, tooling, documentation. I make those decisions in Figma and in code, and I care about how they hold up in production: whether components are accessible by default, whether the tokens actually mean something, whether a team can adopt a pattern without a meeting.

Where I’ve done it

I spent the last year at Linktree as a Senior Software Engineer on Arbor, its design system. Before that, almost six years at thoughtbot: I joined as a product designer and left as Design Director, solving the same problem one client at a time. During that time I served clients as an individual contributor, led product-design sprints, ran teams, and helped shape how the design practice thought about itself.

What I think about

Design systems as product infrastructure. They’re not a component gallery. They’re the thing that decides whether product teams can move fast without fragmenting the experience.

Structure vs. expression. A system should standardize the parts that should be repeatable, and get out of the way for the parts that shouldn’t. Getting that line right is most of the work.

Design and code as one loop, not two disciplines that meet at a handoff. Real decisions happen in both places, and the interesting ones happen when the two inform each other.

What I’m looking for

Senior or staff design-engineer and design-systems roles at companies that treat their system as product infrastructure. Interesting problems at the seam between design and code, especially where the current tooling isn’t quite doing the job. Conversations with people doing similar work, without a specific ask on either side.

Less interested in one-off consulting engagements, or anything that would want me to be a “creative technologist.”