04 · Resume
Kai Sato
Staff Design Engineer
Ten years across design and engineering, specialized in the seam between them: design systems, product interfaces, and the motion and states that make software feel finished.
hello@kaisato.dev San Francisco, CA kaisato.dev
or press ⌘ P
Experience
Staff Design Engineer Northwind · San Francisco, CA
Leading design engineering for the analytics platform. Shipped Pulse — realtime analytics used by 900 customer teams — and rebuilt the design system into one source of truth spanning 140 components across web and docs.
Senior Product Engineer Prism Labs · Remote
Owned the incident and reliability surface end to end. Led Beacon, the honest status page adopted by 900 engineering teams, and grew the frontend platform team from two to six while keeping the interface budget under 100KB.
Frontend Engineer Hatch Studio · Portland, OR
Built marketing sites and product interfaces for early-stage clients — 30+ launches across fintech, healthcare, and developer tools. Learned that shipped and polished beats ambitious and stuck, on every timeline that matters.
Designer + Developer Independent · Portland, OR
Freelance interface design and build for small teams that couldn't hire both. The two-hats constraint became the career: the seams between design and code stopped existing because nobody else was there to own them.
Capabilities
Product engineering
TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node, REST and GraphQL APIs
Interface design
Design systems, prototyping, typography, motion design
Frontend craft
CSS architecture, accessibility, performance budgets, GSAP
Tooling
CLI development, build pipelines, developer experience
Education
BFA, Interaction Design California College of the Arts
Thesis on keyboard-driven interfaces; teaching assistant for the typography sequence.
Certificate, Machine Learning Stanford Online
Completed for literacy, not career change — enough to know what the model can't do.