Regarding: Staff Design Systems Designer

Hi Steph and the Trellis Design Systems Team,
Three things draw me to this position: architecting token systems that scale across product surfaces without fragmenting, building the AI-native tooling Trellis needs for this inflection point, and catching drift before it becomes fragmentation through close engineering partnership.

I've categorized my relevant experience below.

Token architecture and visual systems, at scale:

• Architected a token foundation in Figma, Style Dictionary, and JSON that let React and Angular teams extend the system across 8 multidisciplinary teams without forced migration or component fragmentation using the CMS Quality Payment Program Design System
• Leading the CMS Design System team, I aligned 45+ designers around a single, multi-themeable design system foundation across three brands and 10+ product teams.
• Built a full visual language from zero at 2ndWatch: grid, spacing, WCAG AAA color palette, typography, elevation, delivered as a 23-page developer-facing specification over eight months

Component integrity and drift prevention:

• Built a Figma plugin that flags detached or off-system components before platform staging review, voluntarily adopted by five designers across four teams

AI-native systems, hands-on:

• Built design-system-analyzer, a Next.js application that crawls design system documentation and normalizes component data using a local LLM
• At VA, I reset research objectives, redirected design work toward evidence, and got the team moving again. Using an MCP server wrapping the VA's VistA EHR system to connect a clinical LLM workflow to live patient data, tested by practitioners and accepted into the VA's AI strategy portfolio
• I published "Twelve AI Workflows for Designers" because these tools change how we think about the work itself

Engineering partnership:

• As a forward-deployed designer, I intentionally brought engineers into the design process earlier rather than handing off finished specs, sparking healthy pushback before designs were finalized. The lead engineer later named our team one of the top three highest-performing lead teams of his career and credited that approach as part of the reason
• I spent two years on the VA Lighthouse Developer API platform, working directly with developers to mature the pathway to production. What I learned wasn't about buttons or navigation. It was about mental models. Developers have a job to do. Our job is to get out of the way and make the right decision obvious.

The best design systems don't feel like constraints—they feel like superpowers. I'd welcome the chance to bring that combination- token architecture at scale and hands-on AI-native systems work- to the Trellis Design System team.

Warmly,