Joaquin Perez

I'm a design engineer and creative technologist working where design and engineering overlap, across SaaS and consumer products. I take ideas from coded prototype to production, so decisions get made against something real. I start by sitting with the people who'll use the work to find the actual problem. Then I build new software and systems, or improve what's already running, and I'm comfortable enough in the infrastructure underneath (Docker, AWS, Cloudflare) to keep maintaining them after launch. My work runs from design systems, agents and evals to brand and video.

In practice, that's meant a design system built for people and coding agents at once, with a portal for the team and a live MCP endpoint for the agents, both generated from the code that ships. It's also meant an AI feature that has to feel trustworthy even when the model isn't sure, an internal tool a small team runs its entire business on, and brands that hold up from the logo to the website to a thirty-second spot.

Across twenty years in Brooklyn building films, products and systems, the throughline has stayed the same: make it clear, make it work, make it matter. I'm most energized by hard problems where design and engineering happen together instead of in a relay, and where AI shrinks the gap between idea and product for the whole team.

AI-assisted development changed how I work. I prototype functional interfaces, integrate APIs and build tooling, so engineers start from working code instead of a handoff file, and the team finds out sooner which ideas hold up. I write about these ideas in LoopCraft, a newsletter on creative autonomy in the age of AI.