What I'm looking for next

Hi, I'm Mandy 👋

I'm a frontend engineer with a design background, and I'm looking for my next role. Ideally somewhere design and implementation sit close together. This post is partly a heads-up that I'm on the market, and partly an honest description of the kind of environment that brings out my best work. If any of it sounds like your team, I'd love to talk.

A little about me

I've spent the last five years building and shipping production web and mobile apps in React, React Native, TypeScript, Remix/React Router, and Next.js. Right now I'm at Virtu Studios, where I am working our flagship product Walden and ship client work across web and mobile, including engagements with companies like Dell.

Lately a lot of my energy has gone into the kind of work UX engineers do: design tokens, Figma variables, typography systems, and component libraries that actually match what's in production. Walden is in QA now, with certain features in beta, and the design system is what kept design and code from drifting while we moved fast.

My path into engineering wasn't the usual one. Before I wrote code professionally, I spent a decade doing project-based work across museums and archives, and I came in through design and UX research. That still shapes how I work. I care about the people on the other side of the screen, and I tend to ask "what is this actually for?" before "how do I build it?"

The kind of team I do my best work on

Here's the honest version of what I'm looking for.

A small team. I do my best work when I can see the whole shape of a product and know the people I'm building it with. Small teams move fast, trust each other, and let one person have real ownership over something that matters. That's where I thrive. I love to collaborate with my team.

High impact. I'd rather build one thing that genuinely changes the experience for users than ship a dozen features nobody asked for. I want my work to matter, and I want to be close enough to the product to know whether it actually did.

Space to think deeply. Good frontend work isn't just typing fast. The interesting problems live in the details of how something feels to use, and those details deserve real attention. I want room to think a problem through, not just react to the next thing in the queue.

Room to make data-informed decisions. I like grounding choices in evidence. That comes partly from my UX research roots: I've designed and run user-research protocols, synthesized findings into recommendations, and I'm comfortable with A/B testing and analytics. The goal is always the same, which is building the best possible experience for the people who use the thing. I'd rather know than guess.

What I bring

Design systems that ship. On Walden I built the token layer (Ceramic palette, light/dark modes, semantic aliases), documented typography (Vintage + DM Sans), and mapped it all to Tailwind v4, shadcn/ui, and product components in Figma and code. Check out my blog and case studies to see more!

Real products, end to end. Even outside of work, I've shipped solo across web, iOS, and Android. A public digital archive I founded (Black Mountain College Yearbook) was acquired by a museum in 2024. I've also built and launched Owen (pet health records) Bramble (wildlife rehab patient tracker), and Juniper (wildlife wikis) on my own, design and code. All of these are on my site if you want to poke around.

Accessibility as practice, not a checklist. At Jenzabar I started and led an accessibility working group, got us to WCAG compliance, and baked inclusive design into how the team worked. Accessibility is important to me and I always include this in my workflow for design and code.

Initiative and cleanup. At Sports Card Investor I led a cross-platform tech-debt initiative end to end. At Jenzabar, I cut code complexity by around 70%, which made the app faster and the team quicker. I like to leave my design files and code in a better place than I found it and with enough documentation for anyone that comes in behind me.

Want to chat more?

If you're a small team building something you care about, and you want someone who can move between Figma and React, think carefully about the user experience, and back decisions with data, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

The fastest way to reach me is email at mandyhartmandev@gmail.com

Thanks for reading. Let's build something together!