Staff Product Designer — Design Systems & Complex Interfaces

Auden Reyes

Designing the component libraries, editorial tooling and data-dense screens that product teams live inside every day — then documenting them well enough that nobody needs to ask.

Based
Lisbon · remote across CET & GMT
Availability
Open to new roles from March 2027
Email
auden@orbitfield.studio
01

Profile

Eleven years in product design, the last six spent on systems work: shared components, interaction patterns and the governance that keeps them honest as a product grows.

The work I am best at sits where craft meets maintenance — tables that stay readable at a thousand rows, forms that recover gracefully from bad input, tokens that survive a rebrand, and documentation written for the engineer who joins next quarter. I prototype in the browser rather than argue in the abstract, and I treat accessibility as part of the component contract instead of a review step at the end.

I work closely with front-end engineers and technical writers, run short critique cycles with clear decisions, and prefer a small set of patterns applied consistently over a large library nobody trusts.

02

Selected work

Three projects, in detail

Ledger design system — Northbeam Systems

2024 — 2026

Lead designer · 4 engineers · 9 product squads

Northbeam had three divergent component sets and no shared token layer. I led the consolidation into one system covering web, the internal operations console and the embeddable reporting widget.

  • Audited 240 interface patterns down to 54 components, documenting what each one replaced so squads could migrate without guessing.
  • Designed the token architecture — colour, type, spacing, elevation and motion — with semantic aliases that let a theme change ship without touching component code.
  • Wrote the contribution model: a request template, a weekly triage slot and a written definition of done covering keyboard paths, focus order and reduced-motion behaviour.
  • Rebuilt the data table as a composable primitive with sticky headers, column resizing, inline edit states and a documented empty/error matrix.
  • Design tokens
  • Component API design
  • Documentation
  • Accessibility review
  • Figma variables

Clinical intake rebuild — Linework Health

2022

Senior designer · paired with 2 engineers and a clinical lead

A twelve-screen intake flow that staff routinely abandoned halfway. I restructured it around how an appointment actually unfolds rather than how the database was shaped.

  • Shadowed intake sessions across three clinics, then mapped every point where staff had to leave the screen to find an answer.
  • Collapsed the flow into four stages with a persistent summary rail, so a half-finished record could be handed to a colleague mid-shift.
  • Rewrote all 90 field labels and error messages with the clinical lead, replacing system language with the words staff already used out loud.
  • Specified full keyboard operation for high-volume entry — no pointer required for any step — and tested it with two screen readers.
  • Service mapping
  • Form design
  • Content design
  • Usability testing

Freight tracking console — Caldera Freight

2019

Product designer · dispatch operations team

Dispatchers were running the night shift from a spreadsheet and two chat windows. The brief was a single screen they could trust at 3am.

  • Designed a density-first board with three view modes — lane, vehicle and exception — sharing one filter model so context survived switching.
  • Built a colour and iconography scheme for delay severity that reads without relying on hue alone, verified in greyscale and at low brightness.
  • Prototyped the live-update behaviour in HTML to settle how rows should reorder without stealing the cursor from whoever was typing.
  • Operational UI
  • Information density
  • Prototyping
  • Colour accessibility
03

Experience

Reverse chronological

Staff Product Designer — Northbeam Systems

2023 — present

Design systems & platform surfaces

  • Own the Ledger design system end to end, from token architecture to the published usage guidance teams read before they build.
  • Partner with the front-end platform group on component APIs, naming and deprecation paths so design and code stay in step.
  • Mentor three designers through systems contributions and run the fortnightly pattern critique.

Senior Product Designer — Linework Health

2020 — 2023

Clinical workflow tools

  • Led design for intake, scheduling and the shared patient summary used by front-desk and clinical staff.
  • Introduced the practice's first accessibility checklist and trained the team to run keyboard and screen-reader passes themselves.
  • Ran quarterly research rounds in live clinics and turned findings into a prioritised backlog the product group actually worked from.

Product Designer — Caldera Freight

2018 — 2020

Dispatch & logistics software

  • Designed dispatch, routing and exception-handling screens for a 24-hour operations floor.
  • Established the first shared component sheet and interaction notes for a team of two designers and six engineers.

Interface Designer — Harbourline Studio

2015 — 2018

Client work across publishing and civic services

  • Designed and front-end built editorial sites, archives and booking tools, handing over documented HTML and CSS.
  • Worked directly with clients on scope, content structure and review cycles.
04

Capabilities

Practice

  • Design systems strategy
  • Component API design
  • Interaction & state modelling
  • Information architecture
  • Content & microcopy
  • Research synthesis

Systems & craft

  • Token architecture & theming
  • Type and spacing scales
  • Data tables and dense layouts
  • WCAG 2.2 AA working knowledge
  • Keyboard and screen-reader testing
  • Design documentation

Tools

  • Figma (variables, libraries)
  • HTML, CSS, light JavaScript
  • Storybook review workflows
  • Git-based handoff
  • Linear & Notion
  • Screen readers: VoiceOver, NVDA
05

Education & study

BA (Hons) Interaction Design — Fenwick University

2011 — 2015

Final project: a public-transport timetable interface for low-vision readers, developed with a local accessibility group.

Inclusive Design Practicum — Fenwick Extension

2021

Twelve-week evening programme on assistive technology testing and writing accessible component specifications.

Typography for Interfaces — Marlowe Type Workshop

2019

Short course on type scales, optical sizing and legibility in screen environments.

06

Contact

Happy to talk about systems work, platform design or a stubborn interface problem that needs untangling.

auden@orbitfield.studio
Looking for
A staff or lead design-systems role on a platform team, in-house or product-led.
Portfolio
Case studies and system documentation shared on request, including engineering-facing specs.