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Senior Product Designer

Six years building AI platforms for the Department of Defense — and one AI product shipped solo from zero. I work at the intersection of capability and consequence: where the interface is the difference between clarity and critical error.

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Selected Work

Four problems.
Four case studies.

2021 – 2025
HatchMatch — AI fly fishing app

AI Vision  ·  Founder & Builder  ·  Live Beta

HatchMatch

Built an AI fly fishing app from zero to production, solo. The real design problem was deciding what the interface does when the model isn't sure.

React Native OpenAI Vision Uncertainty UX Solo Build
Case Study
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Tenjin — DoD AI Platform

DoD AI Platform  ·  Founding Designer

Tenjin

SAIC's first UX hire. The design system that made a DoD AI platform usable for everyone — not just the engineers who built it.

Design System AI Marketplace Dual Audience
Case Study
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Koverse — Data Intelligence Platform

Security UX  ·  Military Edge Systems

Koverse

No pattern library covers this. Some problems require designing for systems where the constraints themselves are classified.

Irreversibility UX Geospatial Classified
Case Study
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DHS Border Challenge — Kiosk prototype

Contract Win  ·  Rapid Prototype

DHS Border Challenge

For five minutes, the evaluators weren't watching a demo. They were "Bob Placeholder".

Kiosk UX Biometric Systems Gov Services
Case Study
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About

I design the human layer of AI systems — making powerful, complex, and often irreversible technology legible to the people who depend on it.

I joined SAIC's Innovation Factory in 2021 as its first UX hire, walking into a 25-person AI division with no design function, no system, and no process. I built all of it — the component library, the interaction patterns, the institutional memory for how user-facing decisions get made.

By 2025 the team had grown to 250+. Then the budget cuts came, and (of course) the design role was the first to go. I took it personally for about a week, then decided to go build something myself.

HatchMatch is what came out of that. A production AI vision product, designed and built solo from zero to beta. It's the clearest proof I have that I don't just design products — I own them.

25→250+
First designer in. Last one standing.
4+
Agencies served across DOD, DOJ, DHS, and beyond
1
Contract won with a single-sprint prototype
0 → β
HatchMatch: designed & built alone, zero to live beta

What I bring

AI Product DesignConfidence communication, uncertainty UX, human-AI decision interfaces, explainability as a product feature
High-Stakes UXIrreversible decision design, security-critical workflows, failure state architecture, biometric systems
Design SystemsFigma (advanced), component architecture, token systems, Storybook integration, governance at scale
Product ThinkingZero-to-one ownership, roadmap contribution, monetization UX, feature prioritization
Engineering FluencyReact Native, React, Node.js, Supabase — enough to ship, not just specify

Currently available

Let's create something that
matters.

Senior product design roles at AI-first companies. Especially interested in teams where the design problem is genuinely hard.

hello@stauffercreative.ai View Résumé ↗