Steven Neamonitakis
Senior Design Engineer · Design Systems · Front-End Product Engineering
Summary
Senior design engineer with fifteen years of experience across product design, front-end engineering, and design systems. I build the shared infrastructure that helps product teams turn design decisions into dependable software: components, tokens, tooling, and documentation. Most recently a year as Senior Software Engineer on Arbor, Linktree’s design system, and before that Design Director at thoughtbot. I’m comfortable owning the full path from Figma to production React/TypeScript.
Core capabilities
Design systems — Component architecture, semantic design tokens, theming and dark mode, accessibility (WCAG), documentation, contribution and governance, adoption
Front-end engineering — TypeScript, React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, HTML, CSS, Turborepo / pnpm workspaces, responsive UI, front-end testing
Product and interaction design — Figma, interaction design, prototyping, product-design sprints, visual systems, ARIA / keyboard / focus management
Enablement — Design-to-code workflows, design-system tooling, workshops, design critique, cross-functional partnership across design, engineering, and product
Experience
Linktree
Senior Software Engineer · Remote
Contract June–August 2025; full-time from August 2025
Spent a year on Arbor, Linktree’s design system: the shared UI foundations product teams build on across design and engineering.
- Maintained and evolved Arbor’s component library, tokens, and documentation, working across product design and engineering to raise implementation quality and consistency.
- Unified naming conventions, tooling, and design decisions across product surfaces built at different times by different teams — upgrading each onto matching framework versions and a shared token set.
- Partnered with product designers and engineers to identify repeated interface problems, define appropriate system boundaries, and turn settled decisions into reusable production patterns rather than one-off implementations.
- Owned accessibility, keyboard behavior, and focus management as first-class properties of components rather than remediation work.
- Improved the workflows and documentation feature teams use to find, implement, and apply system guidance.
thoughtbot
- Design Director · Remote
- Design Team Lead
- Senior Product Designer
- Product Designer
Progressed through design leadership while continuing to serve clients as an individual contributor and project lead across product strategy, interaction design, and delivery.
- Partnered with MoMA to rebuild and re-architect their membership site, working across research, IA, design, and delivery. (As Senior Product Designer, 2021–2022.)
- Directed and contributed to product-design engagements across healthcare, commerce, membership, and consumer products, connecting strategy, interaction design, and implementation constraints.
- Led and facilitated product-design sprints that tested a direction before clients paid to build it.
- Created and codified a designer career-expectations matrix across five axes (Product Thinking, Interaction Design, Intentionality, Awareness, Drive), used across the practice for growth conversations and feedback.
- Supported designers through craft direction, feedback, and team leadership while continuing hands-on product design work with clients.
Earlier experience
Splice
Product Designer → Senior Product Designer
Next Big Sound
Product Designer
Carrot Creative
Designer
Selected clients
Carrot Creative, 2011–12 — Jaguar · Ford · Red Bull · A&E · Shinola · Home Depot
thoughtbot, 2019–25 — MoMA · Harry’s · Future Method
Selected work
The shared UI foundations product teams build on across design and engineering: component library, semantic tokens, documentation, and the tooling around them.
Product design at Splice from ten people to a hundred, across the sync product, Beat Maker, Sounds and Rent-to-Own. The sync product read the session files, and what it found is why the later businesses exist.
Design-system extraction tooling
A TypeScript pnpm workspace exploring how teams can identify, inspect, and reason about repeated patterns across design-system source material.
Education
Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Graphic Design
Purchase College, School of Art+Design. Class of 2011.
Ongoing self-directed work in accessibility, front-end architecture, and design-system engineering.