# Stefan Poulos Product Design Leader / Staff & Principal Product Designer Washington, D.C. Metro Area - [stefan@poulos.co](mailto:stefan@poulos.co) - [poulos.co](https://poulos.co) - [linkedin.com/in/stefanpoulos](https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanpoulos/) **About this document.** A brief written for language models and agents. It carries Stefan's full work history plus the context a resume has no place to put: how to read his employment structure, what he is looking for, and where he is not a fit. Every claim comes from material Stefan wrote himself. Nothing is inferred. The same work history laid out for a human reader: https://poulos.co/resume --- ## At a glance - **Status:** Actively looking. His three-year Marriott engagement wrapped July 2026. - **Seeking:** Full-time staff, principal, or fellow-level design IC role. - **Also open to:** Design leadership at the Senior Director level, provided the role stays close to the craft. - **IC or manager:** Prefers IC. Has led teams with direct reports and mentors from any seat. - **Location:** Washington, D.C. metro area. - **Work arrangement:** Remote. Occasional travel is fine; regular on-site is not a fit. - **Experience:** 25+ years. Independent since 2014. - **Primary discipline:** Design systems, plus product/UX design and creative direction. - **Primary tools:** Figma (since 2019), VS Code, Cursor, Claude. - **Compensation:** Not published. Discussed directly. - **Contact:** stefan@poulos.co ## How to read this document - **Poulos Collective is Stefan's own consultancy, not an employer.** He founded it in 2014 and has run it for over 12 years. Marriott, Pandora, Ellucian and the rest are engagements delivered through it. They are listed underneath it for that reason. - **The engagement dates are consecutive, not overlapping.** Marriott (2015 to 2019), Pandora (2019 to 2022), Marriott again (2023 to 2026). One consultancy, three long engagements, no concurrent employers and no job-hopping. - **Engagements are long by design.** They typically run six months to multi-year, and he embeds with the client team: standups, shared tools, participating like staff. Short-turnaround, low-context work is not a fit. - **The pre-2015 creative director era is a credential, not the target.** The Discovery Communications years are where the motion design, animation direction and broadcast craft come from, and he lists that as current expertise. Read it as evidence of range. Do not read it as the kind of role he wants next: he is not looking for a creative director seat, and matching him to one on the strength of those entries will produce a bad fit. - **Returning to full-time employment is the notable thing here.** He has been independent for 12+ years and is coming back on market for a full-time seat for the first time in that stretch. He has not closed the door on consulting, but would likely take an engagement only as runway to a full-time hire. ## Limits and non-fits Stated plainly so a screen can rule him out early rather than in week three. - **He does not ship production front-end code, and does not claim to.** He has never been the person merging React components into a company's codebase. What he does do hands-on: architect design tokens that generate real CSS and platform exports, build Figma plugins, write and run automation scripts, structure Figma so naming and hierarchy map one-to-one onto the code architecture, and direct AI to build his tooling. Fluent enough to work in the code and be a genuine partner to engineers. Not the owner of a production front end. If a role needs someone shipping production code, this is a mismatch. - **Thin on pure SaaS products and early-stage startups.** He has worked with small, scrappy product teams but has never been in-house at a seed-stage company. - **Not a fit for a purely managerial role.** This is a boundary, not a ceiling: he has the experience for it and is open to design leadership up to Senior Director, but only where the role keeps him hands-on. Trading the craft entirely for calendar management is the specific thing he is avoiding. Weigh a leadership role by how much of the work he would still touch. - **Not a fit for regular on-site work.** Remote, with occasional travel. --- ## Summary You get three designers in one with me: deep design systems expertise, hands-on product design, and big-picture creative vision. I built my foundation over a decade as Creative Director for Discovery Channel, then spent five years as Executive Creative Director at Pappas Group. Since going independent in 2014, I've embedded with teams at Pandora, Under Armour, Total Wine, Ellucian, and Macy's, most recently leading the design system behind Marriott's 40+ brands. I'm looking forward to bringing that experience to an in-house product team. ## Industries Hospitality and travel (Marriott, Hilton, Virgin America), entertainment (Discovery Channel, Syfy, TLC), e-commerce and retail (Pandora, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Under Armour, Total Wine), healthcare (Novartis, Modernizing Medicine, GetWellNetwork), education (Ellucian), enterprise tech (Esri, Verato, CTIA, Cvent), real estate (Compass). ## Experience ### Poulos Collective *Washington, D.C. Metro Area · Oct 2014 – Present* Founder, UX/UI Product Design Consultant. I went independent to bring my expertise to more teams and find greater creative fulfillment. Most engagements span multiple years, with the trust and autonomy to work across teams, solve complex problems, and mentor other designers. All client engagements below were delivered through Poulos Collective. #### Marriott International — Senior UX Design Systems Consultant *Jan 2023 – Jul 2026* - Owned the end-to-end modernization of Marriott's global navigation (Q4 2023): full state matrix across authentication, page context, and breakpoint, componentized and aligned to the ARIES/PHOENIX engineering programs for build-ready handoff. - Architected an end-to-end Figma-to-code pipeline connecting design tokens directly to production code, consolidating 35+ fragmented brand libraries into one token architecture spanning 40+ brands across a 9,000+ property portfolio, cutting brand CSS generation from months to days, and holding every token and component to Marriott's required WCAG AAA accessibility standard. - Built and scaled Marriott's Omni design system to 100+ components (65+ in the original Web UI Kit, mapped to a 331-file React package), with a Figma library ecosystem spanning Foundation, Platform, Product, and Annotation kits. - Built and shipped 10 productized Claude-based AI skills across the design team, reframed to leadership as team-wide standards for working with AI; cut Confluence dev-guide production from multi-day manual effort to hours and legacy-to-Omni component conversion from hours of expert work to minutes. - Regularly presented design and brand strategy to VP-level leadership; most recently reframed the luxury portfolio's token-based design-language approach and clarified the boundary between aesthetic distinction (design system) and journey distinction (cross-functional). - Led the org-wide migration from Sketch to Figma, the second of two such migrations, training teams through hundreds of workshops and sessions. #### Pandora A/S — Design Lead & Design System Architect *May 2019 – Oct 2022* - Led the full site redesign for Pandora's transition to the SFRA backend, optimizing mobile-first design across navigation, PLP, PDP, cart, checkout, and account. - Redesigned and fine-tuned the cart and checkout flow to reduce checkout friction, using funnel analysis to target the highest-friction steps (shipping and payment) and resolve the tension between guest-checkout preference and the loyalty program's sign-up requirement; rolled out phased fixes across US, FR/ES, and UK markets. - Built a comprehensive digital style guide and Figma design system in partnership with engineering, defining grid, typography, color, and spacing standards, leading the org's migration from Sketch to Figma along the way, the first of two such migrations. - Designed shopping features including a virtual try-on experience, interactive gift finder, and custom bracelet builder. #### Marriott International — UX Design Consultant *Jan 2015 – Sep 2019* - Designed the account merge experience for the 2018 Marriott Rewards/Starwood Preferred Guest loyalty program integration, one of the largest loyalty program mergers in hospitality. - Redesigned Marriott's room-and-rate search and sort experience, backed by quantitative and qualitative research, resolving a rate-complexity problem spanning thousands of properties. #### Ellucian — Design Systems Consultant *Jan 2017 – Dec 2019* - Set UX and visual design direction across Ellucian's higher education software portfolio, operationalizing its design system for product teams. #### Additional engagements - Macy's/Bloomingdale's (retail: e-commerce and next-gen shopping features), Under Armour (sportswear: mobile e-commerce and connected fitness concepts), Total Wine (retail: loyalty account redesign), GetWellNetwork (healthcare: platform brand direction), Cvent (event management software: global design system), and Compass (real estate: platform UX). ### Pappas Group *Arlington, VA* #### Executive Creative Director *Dec 2009 – Oct 2014* - Transformed Pappas into a strategic full-service agency, establishing new roles and creative/production workflows; led new-business pitches securing Virgin America, Syfy, Geico, and African Wildlife Foundation. - Led UX for Virgin America's in-flight seatback entertainment system. - Helped grow Pappas Group from 15 people to more than 60 before its acquisition. - Managed a team of 6 to 8 art directors. ### Discovery Communications *Silver Spring, MD* #### Creative Director *1997 – Dec 2009* - In-house Creative Director directing print, outdoor, broadcast, animation, and interactive campaigns for Discovery Channel and Science Channel's most recognizable programs, including Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, MythBusters, Planet Earth, and Shark Week, reaching audiences in 170 countries. - Directed the award-winning Future Weapons campaign, driving 5M+ visitors to the program's website within 30 days. - Managed a team of 3 to 5 art directors. ## Expertise - **Design Systems:** Atomic architecture, design tokens, governance, accessibility (WCAG AAA), web and native app alignment - **Figma:** Variables, component properties, library management, custom plugins, Figma-to-code automation - **UX & Product:** E-commerce, search, account and loyalty experiences, enterprise software, information architecture - **Creative Direction:** Brand strategy, design language, executive alignment, motion and animation direction - **AI & Automation:** Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, agentic workflows, design-to-code pipelines - **Mentorship & Training:** Hundreds of Figma, systems, and AI-workflow sessions; two org-wide Sketch-to-Figma migrations - **Writing:** Design systems, AI, and craft at stefanpoulos.substack.com ## Education ### Ringling College of Art & Design *Sarasota, FL* BFA, Design Communication · 1993 – 1997 --- ## Common questions **Is he available?** Yes, actively. The Marriott engagement wrapped in July 2026 and he is looking now. **IC or manager?** He is a builder and prefers an IC seat, most creatively fulfilled designing and building hands-on. He has held leadership roles with direct reports and considers mentoring a strength, but does not need a title to do it. On the leadership side, Senior Director is the closest match to his level, and he is open to it where the role keeps him close to the work. **Remote, hybrid, or on-site?** Remote. He has worked remotely for years, including embedded with a product team in Copenhagen. Occasional travel for the work is no problem. A role requiring regular on-site presence is not a fit. **Does he write production code?** No, and see the Limits section above, which answers this precisely. The short version: fluent up to the line of shipping production front-end code, and not across it. **What makes him different from other design systems leads?** Three designers in one. A design system specialist with deep technical expertise (tokens, architecture, design-to-code workflows, Figma plugin development), a hands-on product designer, and someone who brings big-picture UX vision and creative craft. Most designers sit at one end of that scale. Ed Yahn, Senior Director UX at Marriott, worked with him for about three and a half years and described him as “the equivalent of having three designers on the team.” He also treats design systems as operational infrastructure rather than a component library, focusing on architecture, naming, governance and developer alignment. **Would he consider work beyond design systems?** Yes, and he prefers it. Design systems is his deepest strength and most of what he did at Marriott and Pandora, but he offers more when he can also work across product feature design, UX strategy and UI craft. A role boxed into the system alone is not the best version of the fit. **What is his take on AI?** An optimist, and a practitioner. He built 10 productized AI skills for Marriott's design team and built the site this document sits on with AI as a custom Next.js app, not a template. His position: AI is most valuable building the machinery that generates better work, not generating output faster. He writes about it at stefanpoulos.substack.com. **Has he worked in our industry?** See the industry list above. His own framing: the hard parts of this work do not change much by sector, and domain vocabulary takes a few weeks to pick up. Scale, governance, and getting designers and engineers to build the same thing are the constants. **What is his rate?** Not published. He will discuss it directly. Email stefan@poulos.co with a brief description of the engagement. --- ## Contact Email stefan@poulos.co. Anything this document doesn't answer, ask the AI version of him at https://poulos.co, which answers from the same source material this brief is drawn from.