Principal Product Designer + Design Technologist
Los Altos, CA|Remote only|415-350-0268|david.paterni@gmail.com
Portfolio: https://www.davidpaterni.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidpaterni/
GitHub: https://github.com/davidpaterni/
I lead product design as an individual contributor across enterprise SaaS and consumer apps. I turn dense product logic, complex workflows, and hard constraints into experiences people trust and act on, then move the metrics that prove it. The work spans real estate, health, enterprise operations, analytics platforms, NLP, automotive, and media, plus live products I designed and shipped end to end in accessibility compliance, consumer finance, and interview prep. I'm in the room with engineering through QA, and I stay until it ships. I've authored the standards teams run on. I've taken products from zero to one.
Statmuse, Design Lead. Meltwater, Senior UX Designer. The Huffington Post, Founding Designer, mobile apps. Compete, Designer.
Standards teams run on: I fit an existing process without a ramp, partner with product and engineering from early framing through production QA, and I have authored the standards other people work inside.
Domain adaptability: I learn a domain by building in it, and I arrive fluent in the shape of the problem instead of asking what the problem is.
End to end ownership: I decide what to build, prove it works with analytics and experimentation, and design the surfaces most people skip.
Prototyping and risk reduction: Most of the work lives in Figma. When a flow is too subtle to judge from a static screen, I build a working prototype so the team decides on something running instead of a picture. I do not write production code inside an organization. You have engineers for that. I get the hard interaction right first.
An Act Window lifts a beat before any consequential action and puts it on a short hold that fails closed, so silence never authorizes a charge. Seven states, six failure modes designed first, and a consent gate the supervisor cannot override. Hand coded HTML on a live state machine, four interactive scenarios, synthetic data.
A storm of alerts across six services collapses to one origin, drawn as a service topology with a single traced path and a flame graph where width is time. Hand built in accessible SVG with zero charting dependencies, every node and span focusable, arrow key reachable, and announced through an ARIA live region. Synthetic data.
Four interactive prototypes on how a model earns the right to act: intent negotiated before generation, provenance attached to every claim, a control surface for agents taking real actions, and memory a person can inspect and revoke.
Deterministic EN 301 549 detection with no LLM in the scan path, validated fixes opened as real pull requests through a least privilege GitHub app, ambiguous criteria routed to human review, and every event written to a hash chained, tamper evident audit trail. Every status carries a date and a reason. Document workflow, evidence surfaces, and configurable rules, shipped solo.
Every score opens the exact evidence that earned it, and a contested score re evaluates on the record. Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind on Vercel, shipped solo.
Roughly a thousand statically generated pages built from one asset registry, with hand built SVG charts driven by a single hover hook across mouse, touch, and keyboard, an ARIA live value readout, and no charting dependency on any page. Light and dark from one token set, themed before first paint. Shipped solo.
Five axis score, hard cap disqualifiers, and a build time guardrail that makes shipping a fake verdict a compile error. Shipped solo.
A calmer way to navigate care and the decisions that come with it. Shipped solo.
Local reporting, rebuilt around how people actually read it now. Shipped solo.
One hand written HTML file. No framework, no build step, no dependencies beyond the fonts. Eight capability domains, each one demonstrated by a live specimen on the page: a container query card wired with :has() and no JavaScript, a spring physics drag puck, a token chain that resolves live when the theme changes, and contrast ratios computed live with the WCAG formula.
Enterprise SaaS design system: real tokens, components, blocks, and full screens, live and fluid in light and dark.
Accessibility launch gate for B2B SaaS. Every custom component ships with a contract covering accessible name, role, value, keyboard model, and focus return, demonstrated through live keyboard operable components and verified across six assistive technology configurations.