About me
Alejandro — yes, like the song. An AI Forward Deployed Engineer who likes the room before the code: sitting with a team, finding the problem worth solving, then building and shipping it for real.
Over 10 years I've designed platforms acquired by Wood Mackenzie, built the design system Commonwealth spun off as Advisor360°, shipped medical device interfaces at Philips Healthcare, and led UX at Thought Industries through hypergrowth before moving into hands-on engineering there, shipping AI products to paying customers. Now I work with Snowplow Analytics on their Agentic Design System and run Alebuild, a forward deployed AI studio: I audit how the work really happens, then build and deploy the AI system on top of what's already there.
10+
Years of experience
6
Companies shipped at
3
Products acquired or 2x growth
∞
Hats worn simultaneously before AI
The rare part isn't the model. It's understanding the business reality, deciding where intelligence belongs, building the agent and its guardrails, and getting people to adopt it.
Experience
UI → UX → Director → Design Engineer → Forward Deployed Engineer
2026 - Present
2026 - Present
Founder · Forward Deployed Engineer
Forward deployed AI studio
- Founded a studio that deploys AI into real operations: a design sprint audits the actual workflow, then agents, evals and a staged rollout on top of the client's existing systems.
- Scoped, built and pitched FloorSync for the Orlando Magic's Enterprise Reverse Pitch challenge: a game-night staffing layer on top of ABI MasterMind with an agent that keeps a full audit trail, labor rules enforced in code, a 21-case exception suite and a shadow-pilot plan with pre-registered stop conditions. The proposal runs on synthetic data.
Jul 2020 - Aug 2026
Jul 2020 - Aug 2026
Design Engineer
UX Designer → Lead UX Designer → Director of UX → Design Engineer
- Led UX strategy as Director of UX (2021–2024) through the company's hypergrowth, then moved into a hands-on Design Engineer role in mid-2024 to close the design-to-code gap directly.
- Built Chameleon, a theming system driven by a homegrown design-token architecture (Figma variables grown over years, later aligned to Tailwind for industry standards) that reduced sales demo setup from a week to hours, improved conversion, and gave new customers a polished branded starting point instead of a blank site.
- Pioneered Figma Connect adoption, wiring Figma components directly to their coded React/TypeScript counterparts — including state and prop values — for pre-linked engineering handoff.
- Shipped accessible components to WCAG AA (ARIA, keyboard, axe), validated in Storybook with visual-regression tests in CI.
- Shipped AI-powered learning and customer education tools from prototype to production, including Conversational Search and the Customer Value Agent (an AI proposals product that reached four paying beta customers), and designed user-facing AI and data-driven workflows for LLM-powered assistance, automation, learner experience experiments, and platform quality improvements using Claude Code and Pencil.
Early 2025 - Present
Early 2025 - Present
Design Engineer
Freelance
- Designed and shipped a new platform onboarding flow using AI-assisted ("vibe coding") tools.
- Consulted product, design, and engineering on the foundations for Snowplow's Agentic Design System, driving adoption so teams could move from v0-first prototypes to shipping product ideas directly through the system.
- Designed and prototyped Snowplow's public Chrome extension (Snowplow Inspector) with the Agentic Design System through a Figma-to-Claude Code workflow, and supplied the design-system work behind Signals — now Snowplow's fastest-growing product — which engineering scoped at two quarters and shipped in two months.
Dec 2018 - May 2019
Dec 2018 - May 2019
Product Designer (Contract)
- Designed the design system for the platform that was later acquired by Wood Mackenzie.
- Initiated and managed user experience research, testing processes, and performance metrics analysis to inform design and UX optimization efforts.
Apr 2018 - Jul 2020
Apr 2018 - Jul 2020
Interaction Designer (Contract)
- Conducted in-person user interviews to validate high-fidelity prototypes, focusing on complex interactions requiring pre-investment testing.
- Led diverse projects spanning Cataract Surgery planning to Patient Monitoring equipment, utilizing design thinking methodologies and workshops to address complex challenges.
Aug 2018 - May 2019
Aug 2018 - May 2019
Design System Lead
- Built the design system for Commonwealth's wealth-management workstation — the software later spun off as the standalone company Advisor360° (2019).
- Stood it up in Sketch with Abstract across a 20-person team, doubling designer-to-developer handoff efficiency.
Jul 2018 - Nov 2018
Jul 2018 - Nov 2018
UX/UI Front End Developer (Contract)
- Scaled an empathy-training program from a single in-person Boston cohort to agents nationwide by rebuilding it as a mobile-friendly interactive experience with three branching scenarios — shipped in a 3-month contract.
Feb 2017 - Jul 2018
Feb 2017 - Jul 2018
UX/UI Visual Designer
- Partnered with cross-functional teams throughout the product development lifecycle, from initial research to final launch
- Lead complex ideas around interactivity and motion though prototypes.
2004 - 2007
2004 - 2007
The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale
Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Graphic Design