davidbean

A designer engineering. I research it, design it, then build it, so nothing gets lost in the handoff.

Brooklyn, New York
hi@david.design
david.design · the work, playable
linkedin.com/in/davidmbean
github.com/dmbean

Twenty-five years in software, the first twelve writing it: freelance front-ends, Drupal and SharePoint themes at DPCI, UI Engineer at OpenSky. Then Principal-level Interaction Designer at Bloomberg and Meta, a Director of UX who built and ran a practice of six, and co-founder of a studio that scopes design and engineering as separate disciplines, so I know the handoff from the side that sells it, designs it, and builds it. Since 2025 I take a product from discovery research to the App Store, Google Play, and the web myself: I prototype in code, I ship in code, and I direct coding agents (Claude Code, Anthropic and Gemini models) while keeping every product decision mine. Reading code has never stopped being part of how I design.

01Experience

2019 to nowBrooklyn

SNACKS · Co-founder and Design Engineer

A six-person design-engineering studio I run with Paul Petrowsky: client work and our own products, shipped with coding agents. Since 2025 I design and build the studio's products end to end. Role line: every product below was designed and built by me, with coding agents writing most of the code and the decision logs in each repo as the receipt.

  • Snacks Trivia (iOS, Android, web). A daily trivia game: accounts, push, anonymous play, server-side question generation and moderation, leaderboards, streaks, party mode. Figma to a playable web prototype in two days, the App Store in two weeks, public launch in seven. Next.js first, then Expo and React Native on one Supabase backend. The game got good by subtraction: three mechanics cut after testing with real players.
  • Snacks Brains. The studio's memory and virtual CFO. A discovery pipeline that turns interview transcripts into cited findings and refuses any claim that is not a verbatim quote (653 findings, 18 stages, 1,100+ tests, five invariants enforced by database triggers); local models on raw material, frontier models on scrubbed text only; a company brain over QuickBooks and Harvest, read-only by construction, that runs our receivables.
  • Snacks Sites. A multi-tenant managed website platform: designers ship templates in Figma, read by naming convention; clients edit slots, never structure; review, scheduling, Stripe billing, repo-backed publishing. Next.js, Postgres, Drizzle, Clerk. Ten tenants publish through it. Guardrails as architecture, not guidelines.
  • Snacks Swirl. A daily paint game: hand-rolled Kubelka-Munk pigment mixing over six spectral bands, a WebGL2 paint field with smudge advection, Taptic-Engine haptics on the web, OKLab scoring, a server-refereed leaderboard. Concept to live in two days.
  • Snacks Slides, Tuner, Arcade. A presentation tool where every deck is a website (a 546-line vanilla engine, then a full editor with faithful .pptx import; this resume's site runs on it). A free, ad-less, offline tuner on web, iOS, and Android (McLeod pitch detection, a privacy label that has to be true). A shared account and TV-plus-phones party mode across the games.
  • Before 2025, SNACKS ran alongside my Bloomberg and Meta roles as a product design and strategy practice.
2021 to 2024New York

Meta · Principal Product Designer

Central Privacy, Enterprise Tooling, Developer Experiences, Privacy AI and Automation.

  • Designed the tooling and cross-team workflows Meta used to respond to privacy regulation: first to make the response faster, then to automate the parts that did not need a person. Less about screens than about process: who has to agree, in what order, with what evidence, and how a tool carries that without becoming a bottleneck itself.
  • Aligned engineering, legal, and policy partners across product areas at director level and above; the rule was to bring a working prototype to the meeting, not a deck.
David Bean · hi@david.design · david.design Every product here is live and linked from david.design. Updated October 2026.
2020 to 2021New York, contract

Bloomberg · Senior Interaction Designer

Internal developer tools: enterprise tooling and developer experience in a dense, keyboard-first world. Contract, through SNACKS.

2015 to 2021New York

Dom & Tom · Director of UX (2019), Associate Director (2016), Design Lead

  • Built the UX practice and its process from design lead to a team of six; hired and mentored every designer on it; standardized research, design, and handoff across the agency's project lifecycle.
  • Led the LECET foundational component system (2016 to 2019), the first app for Gemini, the crypto exchange, and enterprise redesigns for BMW, Dick's Sporting Goods, NYU, General Electric, and the University of Oklahoma (two 2017 Gold Addys).
2014 to 2015New York

Code and Theory · Senior UX Designer

The Huffington Post redesign; service design for the launch of Xfinity Mobile alongside Comcast and IDEO.

2011 to 2013New York

OpenSky · UI Engineer, then Interaction Designer

Responsive front-end on a live commerce product: Symfony, Twig, Less, jQuery, Backbone. The chapter this resume rhymes with.

2001 to 2011

Earlier · Web Designer at DPCI (Drupal and SharePoint themes, 2010 to 2011); freelance design and front-end development from 2001

02Skills

Design
Interaction design, prototyping, design systems and tokens, service design, discovery research, motion, accessibility, enterprise and privacy tooling, conversational and agentic AI patterns.
Build
TypeScript, React, Next.js, React Native and Expo (iOS and Android), Node, Postgres (Supabase, Neon, Drizzle), Stripe, Clerk, WebGL2 and shaders, Web Audio, Python pipelines, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS when that is the right tool.
AI-native workflow
Claude Code as the primary coding agent; Anthropic and Gemini APIs in production; local models on Apple silicon for raw material, frontier models on scrubbed text only; eval harnesses, routing policies, and decision logs as part of the deliverable.
Leading
Ran a practice of six; hired, mentored, and reviewed; executive-level alignment at Meta; the studio's product and engineering calls since 2019.

03Recognition and credentials

  • Two Gold and one Silver Addy (2017), Silver Davey (2016)
  • Certified ScrumMaster (2015); Bloomberg Market Concepts (2020)
  • Hunter College, B.A. Photography, minor in Art History
  • Valencia College, A.A. Digital Media

04Clients along the way

Bloomberg, Meta, Huffington Post, Xfinity Mobile, BMW, Comcast, Dick's Sporting Goods, NYU, University of Oklahoma, General Electric, CNN, Gemini, Chase.

05What I want next

A senior individual-contributor role on a team shipping real products to real people, where I keep designing and keep building with the engineering reach AI has put in a designer’s hands. New York, hybrid.

David Bean · hi@david.design · david.design Every product here is live and linked from david.design. Updated October 2026.