Designer. Builder. AI-native.

I'm Tristan — a Bay Area UX and UI designer who has spent the last several years working at the intersection of complex systems and human experience. My work spans enterprise software, fintech, edtech, consumer apps, and most recently, AI-native product design.

Before UX, I worked as a consultant, portfolio manager, and development worker — roles that gave me a deep appreciation for how organizations function, how decisions get made, and how rarely the people building products actually talk to the people using them. Discovering UX design felt less like a career change and more like finding the field that had been waiting for me.

I completed two rigorous programs — a UI/UX course with Springboard and a UX design course with General Assembly — before moving into senior roles. As a Senior Product Designer at Wells Fargo, I worked on transitioning a legacy enterprise system used to track the portfolios of high-net-worth individuals, collaborating across multiple teams in a complex, regulated environment.

I've also been a founder. I launched Shared Process Ecosystems, a SaaS company focused on construction project management, and built it to MVP across desktop, iOS, and Android. It was clean, innovative, and well-designed.

It failed.

That failure is one of the most important things that's happened to my career. It stripped away my conviction that good design is enough — and replaced it with something more valuable: the discipline to listen first, build second, and never confuse your own vision for your users' needs. Every project I've worked on since has been filtered through that lesson.

More recently I've been designing AI-first products — not just interfaces layered on top of AI, but systems where the intelligence is the core of the experience. In two-week sprints, I designed and shipped Fund Cascade, a grant management tool for the U.S. Department of Interior built on OpenAI's LLM, and Taluma, an HR platform that uses AI to match candidates against future skill needs. Both went from concept to working product with real AI integration, prompt engineering, and workflow automation.

I also built TradeTracker, a personal web application that parses Robinhood CSV exports and visualizes options and stock P&L through a color-coded dashboard and treemap — developed in collaboration with Claude, from spec to shipped product.

I'm a generalist by instinct and conviction. The more complex and cross-functional the problem, the more useful I tend to be. If you're building something that matters, I'd like to hear about it.