Carrington SmurlProduct Designer / Engineer

Résumé

Product designer and engineer. Six years owning experiences end to end across AI-first 0→1 products, enterprise B2B SaaS, and mobile — and shipping them to the codebase myself, building with AI in the terminal.

Austin, TX · carringtondesignco@gmail.com· linkedin.com/in/carringtongrace

Experience

Saddle Pass

Head of Product Design (founding)

2025 – 2026 · Austin, TX

  • Owned the end-to-end experience for an AI-first, dual-sided equestrian booking marketplace — from field research with barns, trainers, and riders through engineering handoff and gated beta.
  • Designed for three user types plus internal admin tooling; scoped and prioritised a 16-feature handoff across rider, facility, and admin surfaces.
  • Built the design system — tokens and component library — consumed by a React web app, a React Native app, and a Flutter app, with a sync script and tests that fail the build on divergence.
  • Led a cross-functional team of engineers, a design director, and design interns through weekly design reviews and bi-weekly standups.
  • Designed trust-critical flows including a partner-underwritten ride protection add-on at checkout, balancing customer clarity against partner, legal, and technical constraints.

Carrington Design Co. LLC

Founder & Principal Designer

2025 – Present · Austin, TX · Remote

  • Run a design studio taking on web product, event design, and interior design contracts — selling, scoping, and delivering the work end to end.
  • Sold and scoped a $20K portal and landing-page rebuild for EquiStaff, an equine staffing company, including a UX audit, an AI chatbot assistant, and a React/Tailwind front end on existing APIs.
  • Lead discovery and end-to-end design for B2B and consumer clients: journey maps, IA, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes.
  • Built generative AI into the design workflow to go from concept to working React and React Native prototypes in days, testing with users before committing engineering time.
  • Practise interior design as Stagecoach Design Co., a studio of Carrington Design Co., on residential and short-term-rental projects.
  • Facilitate remote workshops that align founders, PMs, and engineers on the problem, success metrics, and launch scope.

Intapp

User Experience Designer II

Mar 2022 – Jan 2025 · Austin, TX

  • Designed data-dense enterprise workflows for Risk & Compliance and DealCloud, used by regulated professional-services firms; turned research into requirements, design-system components, and ship-ready specs.
  • Extended the shared design system with new components and templates; standardised patterns to streamline onboarding and modernise legacy workflows across web and mobile.
  • Planned and ran interviews, moderated usability tests, and competitive analysis; presented synthesised recommendations to leadership to drive decisions.
  • Facilitated design-thinking workshops that turned ambiguous stakeholder feedback into prioritised backlogs; shipped a mobile dark theme that improved accessibility and adoption.

Pledgr

Product Designer (Contract)

Jun 2021 – Mar 2022 · Remote

  • Owned profile, account, and onboarding design in a pod of three, inside a distributed 10-designer team across four countries; ran sprint rituals and critique.
  • Delivered a fully prototyped profile and accounts experience on a new design system, which was developed and reached testing.

Adaptia Design Agency

Associate Designer

2020 – 2021 · Austin, TX

  • Designed web and e-commerce experiences with developers; UX evaluations reduced cart abandonment and lifted organic traffic.

Skills

AI engineering
Agent design and deployment · multi-agent orchestration · tool and MCP integration · scheduled and event-driven agents in production · evals and guardrails · human-in-the-loop approval gates
AI UX
LLM and agent workflow design · conversational and chatbot UX · prompt design · scoping and refusal behaviour · trust, transparency, and error-state patterns
Design & Research
Figma · design systems · interaction design · IA · accessibility · journey mapping · service blueprints · interviews · usability testing · synthesis
Prototyping & Front-end
React · React Native · SwiftUI · TypeScript · HTML/CSS · Node.js · Python · REST APIs · Git · AI-assisted development in the terminal (Claude Code, Codex)
Leadership
Cross-functional alignment · executive presentation · workshop facilitation · critique · mentoring · customer discovery

Leadership & Education

Community
President, Ladies That UX Austin — 50+ attendees per event · Volunteer Design Lead, Allhers Austin — led 8+ creatives
Education
BFA, Product Design — The University of Texas at Austin
AAS, UX/UI Design — Austin Community College