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 do

With a background in graphic design and a career in product design and engineering, the best description for me is design engineer. I work in the space between product design, design systems and front-end engineering. What I build is the shared 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 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. 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. Before that, five years at Splice as its first full-time designer.

Splice taught me the most: get feedback from the people using your product early and often, because that’s what points it in the right direction. Research is how you make sure you’re solving a problem that exists for people who want it solved. thoughtbot taught me to make that repeatable: a sprint, a brainstorm or a feedback session run from a detailed plan, with every new learning and every open question logged so we could test it later. That’s how the Poppy Flowers sprint ran.

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 the majority 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.

Typography as craft. I’d set type properly even if nobody asked, with accessibility, readability and responsiveness baked in. An opinionated type system shows you care about craft, and it helps your words reach anyone who finds them.

What I’m looking for

Senior or staff design-engineer and design-systems roles at an organization that treats design, engineering and product as one vision. Each has its own deep well of complexity, but when they’re separated or out of step, it turns into a battle between teams, and nobody wins that war. They do their best work organized around a common problem, with a shared way of solving it.

I’d like to be on a team that pairs people with different skills, so a small group can do more than its size suggests, with craft, intention and purpose. I’m most interested in real problems in creator tools, health technology, or anything that pushes boundaries and challenges the status quo.

I’m always happy to talk with people doing similar work, without a specific ask on either side. Sharing insights and fostering community will always be in style in my book, especially over a delicious cup of coffee.