Joel Aguero

Product Design Engineer (Consulting), via Studio Flurry

• Consumer and B2B conversational-AI assistant at an early-stage stealth startup founded by an ex-DeepMind founder.
• Designing the interaction model for LLM-driven, multimodal experiences - making probabilistic agent behavior legible and trustworthy for everyday users.
• Advising on design hiring and strategy.

Founding Designer → Head of Design

• Designed an agentic developer platform - an autonomous coding agent you could tag from GitHub, Slack, and the tools you already work in, hand it a task, and get back a production-ready pull request. Designing for an agent meant rethinking familiar UI patterns from first principles, and most of the work went into making the agent legible - what it understood and where to step in - because that is where trust is won or lost.
• Owned product design end to end across the app shell and information architecture, the integrations ecosystem, onboarding, analytics, settings and admin, and billing - many interconnected surfaces held to one system.
• Led a token-driven, layered design system on shadcn/ui and Radix - semantic tokens, shared primitives, and product components across ~240 screens - with written guidelines and component docs, so quality held as the team grew.
• Founding designer, later head of design. Built and led a five-person design and creative team - three designers, a marketer, and a copywriter - and partnered with ~12 engineers, setting the craft bar and design culture for the product.
• Led brand and creative direction, including a ~$500K go-to-market campaign across out-of-home and paid digital.

Director of Product & Design - First Employee

• First employee and design lead. Recruited, hired, and led a six-person team across design, engineering, and data over two years, owning the brand, the reader-facing site, and the editorial CMS end to end.
• Shipped 10+ editorial and analytics products that lifted engagement 35% and cut newsroom workflow time 40%, as readership grew from zero to 1M+ monthly unique visitors in under two years.
• Led a ground-up rebrand and grew the style guide into a real system - guidelines, templating, quality control, and a quick-turn production setup the newsroom shipped with at speed.
• Designed and built BlockBeat, a programmatically generated, data-driven weekly newsletter for neighborhoods across California - live data feeds, editor-facing variable tooling, and the generation pipeline behind every issue.
• California Journalism Awards: 1st place, Homepage Layout & Design; 2nd place, Story Page Layout & Design.

Founder & Principal

• Independent product design and design-engineering studio for teams at a zero-to-one moment - product strategy, product design, brand, and front end in one team, shipping working code rather than decks.
• Brex - named the company, then designed its brand and first product and built the front end, alongside the founding team.
• Persona - led a UI and brand refresh and designed core product, including the identity verification flow, white-label theming, and a reusable component system.
• Grail - designed the mobile experience for receiving and reviewing medical results, and for scheduling the blood draw behind them.
• UCSF Addiction Care Team - created the brand and identity and designed the website, with ongoing web support.
• Pasture Biosciences - brand, identity, and website for an early-stage biotech.

Software Engineer

• Built large data applications and deployments at U.S. government agencies - where my engineering foundation comes from.

Product Designer

• Designed core learning experiences and growth features for millions of learners worldwide.

Design Fellow

Product Design Intern