Aisha RahmanSenior Frontend EngineerNew York, NY
Demo
View PDF

Professional Summary

Owns design systems the way platform engineers own clusters: versioned APIs, adoption metrics, and a sunset date for the one-off components. React and TypeScript are the materials; the work is making 11 product squads look like one company.

At Kestrel, cut unique button implementations from 47 to 4 and dropped visual-regression escapes 62%. Earlier, built Vellum's token pipeline and Redcedar's first accessible component kit.

Skills

Group by:
10 years:
React
9 years:
TypeScript
8 years:
System Design
AWS
7 years:
Change Management
6 years:
Technical Leadership
Observability
5 years:
Program Management

Work Experience

Kestrel Interface Lab
New York, NY, June 2021 to Present
New York product studio whose clients kept shipping a different button per squad. Aisha's job is one system, versioned, with receipts.

Senior Frontend Engineer Kestrel Interface Lab

Rebuilt the React kit on tokens and headless primitives so a second brand could land without a fork. Unique button implementations fell from 47 to 4; visual-regression escapes dropped 62% in two quarters. The working group still reviews the PR that would have been button number 48.
Shipped codemods and a six-week office-hours cadence so the v2-to-v3 cutover had a calendar, not a hope. 11 squads completed the migration; leftover one-off components fell 84%. Adoption was scheduled in the same spreadsheet as the sprint, which is why it finished.
Instrumented production usage so unused primitives could be deleted with evidence instead of a design-system eulogy. Removed 23 dead exports and cut bundle size for the kit 18%. If a primitive has no consumers, it is a candidate for deletion, not a case study.

Vellum Systems
New York, NY, September 2017 to May 2021
Manhattan SaaS company that sold workflow software and a design language that lived in a Figma file no engineer opened.

Frontend Engineer Vellum Systems

Built the Style Dictionary path from Figma tokens to TypeScript so three brands stopped hand-editing hex values in a pull request. Theme drift across those brands fell from weekly hotfixes to a monthly release. Designers ship tokens; engineers stop hunting for the unofficial gray.
Replaced custom inputs with a React kit that passed WCAG 2.1 AA on the first audit, which is not how the previous kit went. Form-related support tickets dropped 31%. The stories include the keyboard path; the old one-offs did not.
Shipped the docs and playground on CloudFront so designers had a URL that was not a Storybook someone forgot to deploy. Weekly unique visitors from design went from 6 to 48; Slack questions about how to use a component fell by half. The site is the contract; office hours are for the exceptions.

Featured Projects

Headless token-driven design system primitive kit

Open reference components for buttons, menus, and dialogs with tokens as the only theme API. Written so a second brand can land without a fork. The stories include the keyboard path the last kit treated as optional.

React
TypeScript
System Design

Education

New York University

B.S. Computer Science — May 2015

School of Visual Arts

Certificate, Interaction Design — December 2017

Certifications

Professional Scrum Master I

Scrum.org — November 2020

Credential ID: PSM1-AISHA-1109

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

Amazon Web Services — March 2022

Credential ID: DVA-AISHA-0322