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Hi, I'm Chris.

Product engineer and designer.

I design it, build it, and ship it.

14 years as the first, sole, or early designer-engineer in the room. Companies I helped build went on to IPO or get acquired. Now building voice AI.

Open to AI product engineering Design engineering Agentic systems design Senior IC to Staff

Healthcare, marketplaces, game dev tools, consumer software. Usually the first or sole designer in the room: writing specs, shipping alongside engineers, then eventually shipping the code myself. I do my best work owning the full arc from the first user conversation to production. Based in foggy 🌁 San Francisco sunny 🌺 Honolulu, HI.

When I'm not building, you'll find me 🎲 playing board games, 🕺 dancing, or 🛼 roller skating.

ex-Amazon Clover Health GoodRx Sharecare Founder UW BS + MS

I started as a designer. Then I learned to code. Now I build the whole thing.

  1. Designer 2012 – 2022

    First or sole designer at multiple companies. Research, specs, systems.

  2. Design Engineer 2022 – 2024

    Bootcamp. Then an engineering role. Then solo-built PlaySesh from scratch.

  3. Founder / PE 2024 – present

    Co-founding and shipping end to end. Research, product, UX, voice AI stack.

Early at Clover Health and GoodRx, both later IPO'd. In the room through two acquisitions: Iodine into GoodRx, doc.ai into Sharecare. Built the 2014 TaskRabbit rebrand, before IKEA.

Read the full story

I studied Human-Computer Interaction at UW and came out believing good design isn't decoration; it's how you show people you actually thought about them. That took me through Amazon, TaskRabbit, Clover Health, and Iodine/GoodRx, usually as one of the first designers in the building. Clinical tools, design systems, data visualizations: ~7–8× revenue impact on nurse home visits, Webby-winning drug information, research that showed up in federal drug-pricing debates.

Somewhere along the way I got tired of throwing designs over the wall. I started coding my own work, moved into a software engineering role at Modus Create, then built PlaySesh end to end (Vanilla JS, Express, Supabase) before co-founding it. That chapter is where I proved I could own the full stack: research, UX, systems, and production code.

In 2026 I co-founded y30 with Vijay Sivaji. y30 is voice AI for elder care: daily check-ins that help older adults stay connected while giving caregivers and clinicians real signal between appointments. I own the product, the UX, and the voice stack.

What I'm looking for

I've spent 14 years learning to own the whole thing myself: research, design, build, ship, no handoff. AI is the leverage I've wanted the whole time: it lets me build, learn, and iterate faster, and compound every cycle. Small, fast, AI-native teams are finally how the best products get made, and that's what I've been building toward.

  • A small, high-output team where the work is the scoreboard, and I own a product surface end to end: research, specs, UX, and full-stack implementation in one loop.
  • AI-native teams building products where design craft and engineering depth both matter. Healthcare, creative and dev tools, complex SaaS. Founding teams or senior IC pockets inside larger organizations going through AI transformation.
  • I've figured out how to use AI as a force multiplier. High craft standards, direct collaboration across product, design, and engineering, and the latitude to move the way AI actually enables: doing better work, faster, with more rigor. Not as a shortcut to skip thinking.

Current work

Past founder work

Selected work

The work I can point to a number on. Fuller history below.

Clover Health

Lead Product Designer (2nd designer) · 2015–2016

Rewired the NP home-visit workflow end to end: shadowed real visits to understand the clinical reality, redesigned the IA and interactions, and worked directly with product engineering to ship it. ~7–8× lift in visit-related revenue. ~2 hours saved per nurse per day. Also stood up the first design-system foundations.

Healthcare

IPO

Design System

Amazon

User Experience Designer · 2012–2013

Prototyped the flow to buy and gift Amazon Prime, which contributed to 1M+ new subscribers. My first taste of shipping product at scale.

Big Tech

Prime

UX

TaskRabbit

Product Designer · 2014–2015

During the 2014 rebrand, I owned the Tasker experience end to end (research, IA, UX, visual design) and pitched in across the broader rebrand wherever I could, working closely with the PMs and engineering. Tasker NPS recovered from roughly −5 in mid-2014 to the mid-50s, and Client NPS to the high-40s.

Marketplace

Acquisition

Rebrand

Additional experience

  • CureWise Contract Software Engineer · oncology AI 2025–2026

    Oncology AI

    Multi-agent

    Fasten Health

    Next.js

    TypeScript

    Firebase

  • Blue Startups Entrepreneur in Residence 2024

    Accelerator

    Advising

    10 startups

  • Modus Create ↗ Software Engineer · Atlassian apps 2023–2024

    Shipped dark mode for JIRA and Confluence Cloud (500K+ enterprise users). Owned design, engineering, and internal documentation.

    TypeScript

    Docker

    CI/CD

    Atlassian

    Dark mode

  • StartPlaying First Product Designer 2022–2023

    YC W20

    a16z

    TTRPG

    Stripe

    0→1

    Figma

  • Sharecare (doc.ai) Lead Product Designer · product rescue 2021

    Clinical Trials

    IPO

    Acquisition

    SaaS

    Healthcare

  • Pathstream Lead Product Designer · first design hire 2019–2020

    0→1

    LMS

    Design System

    Storybook

    Motion

    Principle

  • Techstars IoT ↗ Advisor · IoT accelerator 2016–2017

    Accelerator

    Advising

    IoT

    NYC

  • Mozilla Product Designer · Firefox OS 2013–2014

    Firefox OS

    Mobile

    Media apps

🎓 University of Washington · BS Informatics (HCI) & MS Human Centered Design & Engineering

How I work

On most projects I connect research, product decisions, design craft, and implementation. I'm comfortable being effectively the PM and designer, or the engineer with strong UX opinions, owning the whole arc when that's the fastest path.

Design

  • Product design (0→1, interaction, systems thinking)
  • UX research (field interviews, usability testing, user testing)
  • Design systems (Figma, React + Storybook + Chromatic, design tokens)
  • Prototyping (Figma, Principle, interactive)
  • Motion design
  • Accessibility (WCAG) & elder-care UX
  • Information architecture

Engineering

  • React · TypeScript · Vanilla JS · Python · Next.js · HTML/CSS
  • Voice AI (LiveKit · real-time STT/LLM/TTS pipelines · VAD & turn-taking)
  • Agent orchestration (FSM/LLM hybrid · prompt & system-instruction design · attention arbiters · multi-layer safety harnesses)
  • Evals & observability (LLM judges · behavioral rubrics · evaluation UX · provenance · telemetry · WER)
  • Multi-agent AI (Claude · OpenAI · OpenRouter · Perplexity · MCP)
  • Supabase · Firebase · Postgres · Cloudflare Workers · Docker · CI/CD · test-driven development
  • Product engineer mindset (owning features across stack, UX, data, and abstractions)
  • Tauri · Discord SDK · tldraw

Recommendations

Pulled straight from my LinkedIn recommendations.

He has enough technical know-how and communication skills to effectively interact with members of the team who oversee different aspects of the product, both business and technical.

Marc Mendiola Software Engineer · GoodRx / Iodine

He is literate in code, engineers love working with him, and he is deeply attuned to the needs of ordinary people. We worked on healthcare information and tools, which is not an easy area to understand user needs and concerns.

Thomas Goetz Direct manager · GoodRx

Chris completed each phase by himself, from user research to visual composition. Together, we built software from scratch for users ranging from Nurse Practitioners to Customer Service Representatives.

Dan Lee Product Engineer · Clover Health

He is constantly learning and his passion extends beyond work to things like building a board game, learning new dance moves, or rollerskating. Chris collaborates exceptionally well.

Nate Tucker Direct manager · AI / Stealth
Talk to people who've built with me. Vijay Sivaji (co-founder, y30) and Brett Groshong (co-founder, PlaySesh) are glad to get on a call and tell you what it's really like. Just ask.
Talk to a reference

Side projects

Things I build to learn. Each one was a deliberate skill unlock.

Voice Noir

A voice-first noir detective game. Inspect the crime scene, question witnesses, and crack the case by calling out contradictions out loud. My hands-on exploration of STT, TTS, and voice-driven interaction design: the same problem space as y30.

Unlocked: voice UX, Web Speech API, ElevenLabs TTS, real-time state from speech

Voice AI

STT

Web Speech API

ElevenLabs

React

TypeScript

Active · April 2026
Evolve, Die, Repeat pixel-art creature

Evolve, Die, Repeat

A 2D side-scrolling roguelite where you swap body parts mid-run to evolve: grow fins to swim, wings to fly, claws to climb. Built solo in Love2D (Lua), test-driven with 1,462 tests across 69 files, a telemetry and playtest-feedback pipeline, and CI/CD that ships Windows, macOS, and Linux builds to itch.io. In friends-and-family playtesting. Inspired by Hades, Dead Cells, and E.V.O.

Unlocked: Lua, Love2D, test-driven game dev, telemetry-driven iteration, automated cross-platform CI/CD

Love2D

Lua

Roguelite

Game Design

Test-driven

Telemetry

CI/CD

itch.io

Active · January 2026
Made with Unity

Rat with wings

A Flappy Bird clone I made to get familiar with a game engine. Built in Unity with C#.

Unlocked: Unity, C#, game engine fundamentals, shipping a playable web build

Unity

Game Dev

C#

Game Engine

Figma

Finished · 2023
OpenAI

Translator: AI Polyglot

An AI-powered language translation app. Built in JavaScript with the OpenAI API.

Unlocked: first LLM API integration, prompt design, shipping a live AI app

AI

OpenAI

JavaScript

API

Figma

Finished · 2023
Zodiacus 3D-printed game pieces

Zodiacus

A board game I'm designing. I'm an avid board gamer who always wanted to make my own. Got to alpha with playtesting before putting it on ice.

Unlocked: systems design, physical prototyping, playtesting methodology

Game Design

Tabletop

Board Game

3D Printing

Playtesting

On hiatus · 2021

Let's work together.

Selectively open to senior IC roles. Warm intros preferred.

Open to AI product engineering Design engineering Agentic systems design Senior IC to Staff

Still weighing fit? Ask my hiring guide, or reach out directly.