# 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

Forward deployment: Operational audit & workflow mapping | Stakeholder discovery | Human-in-the-loop interface architecture | Agent guardrails | Evals & failure taxonomies | Shadow & staged deployment | Product strategy | Design systems

Tech: TypeScript / JavaScript, Node.js, React | Agent loops with tool calling, strict JSON-schema outputs, checkpoint & resume | Vercel AI Gateway, Jev typed evaluation | Claude Code | Eval harnesses (labeled cases, holdouts, pass rates) | JSONL audit logging | Typed component registries for coding agents | node:test, Storybook, visual regression, CI | Figma, Figma Connect | Tailwind CSS | Git / GitHub

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