ALEJANDRO HAYDAR

AI Forward Deployed Engineer & Product Strategist

hello@alebuild.co | 857.869.7356 | linkedin.com/in/alejandrohaydar

SUMMARY

AI Forward Deployed Engineer with 10+ years of product leadership, including three platforms acquired or spun off (Best Buy, Wood Mackenzie, Advisor360°) and a run as Director of UX. Audits how work actually happens inside a business, decides where AI belongs and where it doesn't, then builds and deploys the agents, guardrails, evals, and human-in-the-loop interfaces people adopt, layered over the systems the business already runs instead of replacing them.

SKILLS

Languages: English, Spanish (bilingual)

EXPERIENCE

ALEBUILD - Founder, Forward Deployed Engineer

2026 - Present

Founded a forward deployed AI studio: a design sprint audits the real workflow, then agents, evals, and a staged rollout over the client's existing systems.
FloorSync (Orlando Magic Enterprise Reverse Pitch, proposal submitted Oct 2026): scoped, built, and pitched solo a game-night staffing overlay on top of ABI MasterMind. Built a tool-using agent that pauses for a named supervisor, with schema-validated outputs, checkpoint/resume, fail-closed behavior on critical-source outages, and a full JSONL audit trail (93 tests).
Kept labor rules (skill, pay work type, partner boundary, hours, freshness) in deterministic code and limited the model to classifying messy text; in a synthetic shadow test the one model miss (0.77 confidence) was blocked by a rule. Wrote a 21-case exception suite, a 25-run event simulation, and a shadow-pilot plan with pre-registered stop conditions. Synthetic data; no live venue integration.

THOUGHT INDUSTRIES - Design Engineer

Jul 2020 - Aug 2026

(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.
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.
Led design on the Customer Value Agent, an AI proposals product, earning codebase access and taking it from discovery to four paying beta customers.
Built a closed-world, typed component registry so coding agents generated UI only from real design-system components; rebuilt the pattern outside work and evaluated it across 90 scored generations.
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.

SNOWPLOW ANALYTICS - Design Engineer (Freelance)

Early 2025 - Present

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.

PHILIPS HEALTHCARE - Interaction Designer (Contract)

Apr 2018 - Jul 2020

Conducted in-person user interviews to validate high-fidelity prototypes for complex, pre-investment interactions.
Led projects from cataract-surgery planning to patient-monitoring equipment using design-thinking methodologies and workshops.

GENSCAPE - Product Designer (Contract)

Dec 2018 - May 2019

Designed the platform later acquired by Wood Mackenzie.
Ran UX research, testing processes, and performance-metrics analysis to inform design.

COMMONWEALTH FINANCIAL NETWORK - Design System Lead

Aug 2018 - May 2019

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 for version control across a 20-person team, doubling designer-to-developer handoff efficiency.

SWIRL NETWORKS - Product Designer

Feb 2017 - Jul 2018

Partnered cross-functionally across the full product lifecycle, from research to launch.
Led interactivity and motion concepts through prototypes.

EDUCATION

THE ART INSTITUTE OF FORT LAUDERDALE

Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc), Graphic Design — 2004–2007

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Alejandro Haydar