# Aayush Iyer > Senior Director at Algolia Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/aayushiyer ## Work Experience ### Senior Director of UX and UX Engineering @ Algolia Jan 2023 – Present I’ve joined Algolia to widen my influence and UX practice to solve interesting business problems and influence product and engineering teams. My role here includes leading a number of Product teams focused on Merchandising, Generative AI, and ML-powered Recommendations. I also lead the Product Design and Research teams, as well as a team that builds and manages InstantSearch, our industry leading UI library that powers thousands of search interfaces. In addition to some of the work supporting UX teams listed below, here are some more highlights of this role so far: - I lead a number of product teams focused on Merchandising, Generative AI, ML-powered Recommendations, and Frontend Platforms. These teams have shipped many exciting new directions for Algolia and Algolia’s customers, especially in the critical e-commerce category. One of these releases is Algolia's Generative Shopping Guides, which utilizes customers' search indexes to generate and summarize unstructured content rapidly. This and many other exciting GenAI products are in active development - each of these focus on baking in great UX defaults that are intuitive to customers, reduce integration complexity, and mitigate typical GenAI risks of safety and hallucination. - I also lead a strong UX and Frontend engineering team that develops InstantSearch, our industry leading, open-source Search UI Library. This library powers thousands of search experiences on the Internet and is regularly referenced and used by competitors and partners. We’ve shipped some incredible improvements to the InstantSearch experience - this includes easily capturing customer events to improve their search quality, integration of Algolia Recommend to allow customers to easily power their Search and Discovery with a single UI, and release an overhauled React InstantSearch that has since become our most popular library. ### Senior Director of UX and UX Engineering @ Algolia Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Highlights: • Established a foundational research practice at Algolia by securing buy-in and investing in a strong mixed methods research team that has become fundamental to how products are shaped, built, and refined at Algolia. This team has educated and built an appetite across the organization for not just more research, but also a nuanced understanding of how it can inform our R&D and Marketing practice. This team has set up a number of executive CABs, built and managed a Research Participant Database, and defined a comprehensive set of personas informed by 1200+ prospects and customers that were recruited, interviewed, clustered, and mapped into segments that are relied on by our GTM and R&D teams. - Restructured our Product Design team - this included securing buy-in for a dedicated Design Systems owner, transitioning the team to an embedded partnership model, establishing a constructive-yet-thorough UX review practice, and driving closer collaboration between design and product teams. Through this, a number of mission critical Algolia products were developed including Algolia’s Merchandising Studio that is essential for our for e-commerce customers. In partnership with our growth team, the team released hundreds of experiments to better understand and solve for business goals. We also modernized Satellite, our internal design system by developing new UX engineering workflows, visual and accessibility testing improvements, and a refresh to our visual design. ### Head of UX Infrastructure & Core Platform Design @ Twilio Inc. Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area I founded the design systems practice at Twilio and grew a team from an ad-hoc, unsystemized front-end environment to a fully funded, staffed, and roadmapped discipline. Over time, this scope evolved to the entire spectrum of UX Infrastructure including content writing, visual design, and design operations and focused on alignment of design, engineering, and product to create great customer experiences. My outputs were both tactical and cultural: setting product teams up for quick wins by providing resilient, performant UI, uplevelling the scale at which product design is delivered to an organization, and focusing on customer inclusion and happiness through inclusive design, UX engineering, content writing, and more. Highlights: - Proved value of and grew a team from a contributory capacity to a fully funded, dedicated UX practice at Twilio. - Instituted a system of review, education, and enforcement of Accessibility and Inclusive Design practices. - Secured buy-in and adoption of a new design system across 15+ BUs across Twilio, leading to a unification of technology stacks, significant payoff of technical debt, and improved shipping velocity. - Led a redesign of Twilio's UI language that unified the look and feel of Twilio with multiple billion dollar acquisitions to give customers a familiar, modern, and single pane of glass to use. ### Design System Manager @ Twilio Inc. Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Design Systems Lead @ Twilio Inc. Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 ### Senior Product Designer @ Twilio Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area I'm designing the next generation of Twilio's products, and frameworks that help us build delightful developer experiences. This includes: Studio: Studio is a visual drag&drop interface to orchestrate and manage omni-channel communications. It's a low-code way to build communications on Twilio. Since it's a visual reflection of Twilio's APIs, it's designed to adapt and manage the complexities and situations that every developer faces, while building with Twilio. Studio's incredibly exciting to me: it exposes the ability to communicate to a whole new class of developers (and non-developers too!). Functions: Building an IDE and serveless build interface on top of Twilio's a pretty interesting challenge. And that's what we set out to do with the design and continuous improvements of Twilio Functions. My work involves the continuous improvement of the IDE interface, building out a critical developer experience for customers across their lifecycle from prototyping to production at scale. Twilio Functions is under the hood of most of Twilio's products: current and future. Autopilot: I lead the design for Twilio Autopilot, an ambitious take on solving customer experience challenges using machine learning. The product was built with continuous tuning through developer feedback, and with a focus on simplified design and build experiences. It's early days yet, and there's a lot to be done. More on this soon. ### Design Lead @ Clef Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Oakland I joined Clef to lead their design efforts to make their vision of tomorrow's security intuitive, accessible, and scalable. My work's been focused on the Clef Native (embeddable passwordless account security) and Instant2FA (rapidly deployable hosted & managed two-factor auth). In addition to product, visual, and interaction design, I’m involved in growth marketing efforts, helping product strategy and analytics. Clef was acquired by Twilio in 2017. Highlights: * Developed prototypes and proof-of-concepts for key enterprise clients * Designed the onboarding and user experience for an embeddable passwordless authentication system (Clef Native) * Designed and implemented a rapidly-deployable hosted, managed 2FA SaaS product (Instant2FA) ### Senior Product Designer @ Vouch Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 I joined Vouch as a senior product designer, and focused on spearheading the growth efforts of the lending startup, from the lens of design thinking, learning, and iterative development. It was a fascinating role that merged my vernaculars in design, product, data and development — with a specific focus on boosting metrics that made Vouch a unique lending platform. I worked across Vouch’s stack: building an optimal experience for prospective borrowers, crafting a secure and compelling experience for our unique take on vouches by sponsors, and optimizing the backend to quickly and effectively process applications, detect fraud and effectively mitigate potential losses. My work, on a daily basis, involved use of design tools & thinking, front-end (and occasional back-end) development and data-analysis platforms. My process involved building testing frameworks, systems for analysis and implementing successes in a rapid, lean way: whilst still allowing time for quality design thinking and finesse. More about my work at Vouch: http://aayushis.in/#vouch ### Design Lead @ Intro Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 At Intro, we set out to find a better way to harness the incredible network that each one of us accumulates through professional and personal relationships. My work at Intro was the first step in this direction, serving a simple purpose: find an elegant, unobtrusive way to connect people within your network. As the design lead for Intro, I’ve defined the way the product works and feels. Thus, a lot of my time was spent working on Intro’s two key segments: the iOS app, and the web-playground where new ideas are prototyped. The iOS app was where ideas that are further in our validation process were implemented: this involves defining how the product works, the spatial and transitional models used for the app, UI details and micro-copy. For the web playground, I focused more on implementing our hypotheses as quickly as possible: building wireframes directly on a bootstrap and working with real data to see what patterns emerge. Together, it was a satisfying tick-tock of product design: envisioning what’s possible, and making something that works, work great. And of course, like any early stage startup: I wore multiple hats: defining product analytics, crafting decks for fundraising, setting up marketing websites and much more. More about my work at Intro: http://aayushis.in/#intro ### Product Designer @ Kyber Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 As the lead product designer on DoNext (now known as Kyber), my responsibilities included the designing the iOS app, marketing collateral and other visual assets. I was also involved in the day-to-day development of the web prototype: often adding hotfixes and even the occasional feature to the Sinatra backend. Since DoNext was a small, early-stage, startup, I also took up a significant amount of responsibility in promoting and distributing the app. To mitigate risks and validate decisions, I spent a lot of time prototyping and using analytics for insights: thus, I spent time implementing multi-variate tests via Mixpanel, Google Analytics and Ruby/JavaScript. More info about DoNext: http://aayushis.in/#today ### Visual Designer @ angry+bovine Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Boulder AngryBovine is a multi-disciplinary creative studio based in Boulder, Colorado. It specializes in brand development and digital design, but believes in putting the right ideas and thinking to work in the mediums that it requires to be successful. I work directly with the Founding Creative Director on Visual Design, Identity and Brand Development, Web Development and prototyping. ### Founder @ piq Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Boulder, Colorado piq is a jukebox for social spaces -- a tiny device that connects music to the people around you so they can democratically influence what plays next. After developing and designing the original prototype, I spearheaded efforts to bring piq to the masses. piq launched on Kickstarter in May, just four months after the product was conceived. And while we didn't make our funding target, its idea lives on and we continue to develop it. Roles: Design (Industrial/Visual) Development: (Prototype/Front-End/Backend/Embedded) Business Development & Marketing More about piq here: http://aayushis.in/#piq ### Pre-Tech Career @ Varied Jan 2003 – Jan 2013 Before making a career switch to working in technology (and specifically products), my career involved multiple turns which have informed the experiences after. Journalism - My very first employable role was as a Writer on Digit, India's premier technology publication. In addition to technology and software reviews, my work also focused on investigative pieces such as the state of Computer and Electronics recycling in India. Eventually, I took on a sub-editor position at the same organization Advertising - I worked with Ogilvy and GREY, two of the largest advertising companies in the world. I started off as a copy editor with Ogilvy, and ended my time in advertising with an Associate Creative Director role at GREY. My work for clients such as Volkswagen, STAR TV, and Asian Paints has won multiple awards and critical recognition. ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/aayushpi - Website: http://www.aayush.fyi --- Source: https://flows.cv/aayushiyer JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/aayushiyer/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05