Hi, I'm Vlad
Product Designer
I've been designing digital products for 7+ years — the last four deep in fintech, across consumer, business, and internal platforms — usually owning the problems that sit between product design, design systems, and engineering. I bring structure to ambiguity and turn design into something teams can actually ship from.
Based in Lisbon · Local contract in Portugal & remote (B2B, EOR)
Selected work
Banking platforms, design systems, and the Figma tooling built to ship them — case studies with the reasoning, not just the screens.
Work Experience
Leading the design of a unified frontend system for one of the country's largest banks, consolidating multiple internal products into a single high-load web interface. Architecting a proprietary design system with advanced Figma features (slots), focusing on scalability. Developing custom Figma utility plugins — including Principal, a design-system intelligence layer — that use AI to automate token management and design QA. Driving cross-functional alignment by hosting workshops for devs and analysts.
Evolved a design system serving B2C, B2B, and web products, unifying the design language across all three platforms. Built a custom Figma plugin that removed manual token sync from the design-to-code workflow entirely — and turned engineering into advocates of full multi-level tokenization. Designed the B2B merchant experience (in-app business registration, POS setup) and commissioned deep-dive merchant research from the newly formed research team. Collaborated tightly with PMs, QA, and engineering, often catching frontend UI bugs and proposing code-level fixes.
Led the overhaul of a legacy design system for a mobile bank with 4M+ registered users, designing and documenting 80+ components from scratch. Redesigned core daily banking flows (Main Page, Payments, P2P) based on mixed-method UX research with real customers. Created functional prototypes and built a JSON/HTML export tool to simplify developer handoff.
Deliberate creative chapter between product roles: together with the mocfest team, co-created and produced WECOSMOS — at the time the country's largest multimedia art festival (two editions) — owning production, exhibition curation, the light show, and identity, while helping grow the organization itself; art-directed other festival projects. British Council Creative Producers alumnus (trained at Manchester International Festival). Hands-on period with 3D, generative imaging (StyleGAN, later Flux/ComfyUI), and electronics for installations — skills that now power my AI-assisted design tooling.
Built the company's first design system (150+ components). Designed core web products including the domain marketplace and user accounts. Worked in distributed teams across the UK and US.
