# Ali Almossawi > Critical Thinking Writer · MIT · Product Design, Data Visualization Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/alialmossawi Product Designer + Engineer + Data Visualization Lead Thoughtful products that blend design, engineering, and data visualization. I empower teams to ship beautiful, intuitive products that automate workflows and increase productivity. In my current role, I lead data visualization for a 0 → 1 product. At Apple, I led teams of engineers and designers building flagship internal tools for Cybersecurity and AI/ML. I coached and grew my teams while running pillar leadership, ideation and prototyping, monthly editorials (comms), roadmaps, stakeholder alignment, hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews, and career-growth plans. Beyond my core product work, I build AI products for fun (https://checkyoshelf.com) and write to inform (https://almossawi.substack.com). I've been mentoring engineering students through office hours as part of the MIT and Carnegie Mellon alumni advisory groups for a decade now, and interviewing applicants to MIT. I founded and ran a boutique design agency while I was in grad school. Our work focused on branding and product design for international brands. More recently, I came close to co-founding a chocolate company and learned so much about the chocolate industry. My illustrated books on critical thinking have reached 3.5+ million readers, and sold 400K+ copies across 23 languages. My data visualizations have reached millions of people. I write on popular science and cognitive psychology twice a month to a readership of 7,000. I lead from the heart, and I’m always looking to connect with engineers, designers, mentors, and peers who share a passion for elegant products and lifelong learning. Full profile: https://almossawi.com ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Designer, Data Visualization @ Laurel Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Data Visualization Lead for Signal. ### Storyteller @ Sony Interactive Entertainment Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco, California, United States Joined the Product organization as a subject-matter expert to craft memorable stories for busy people. Data narratives turned opaque datasets into accessible experiences that generated a pipeline of candidate models for production. ### Sr. Engineering Manager @ Apple Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States Led a distributed team of 6 engineers across California, Seattle, and Japan to design and launch self-service, web-based data products for AI/ML teams working on models for Apple Intelligence and Vision Pro. Automated developer workflows, boosted meaningful usage by 450%, maintained 85%+ CSAT, and increased developer productivity by 30%. ### Engineering Manager @ Apple Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco, California, United States Led a team of 9 software engineers and designers in California. Established the Engineering + Design team in Security. Built web-based cyber and information security products that helped increase usability and adoptability throughout Apple. ### Staff Engineer @ Apple Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Data visualization for the team tasked with protecting Apple’s networks. Gave talks and built enduring products that helped teams determine how best to communicate with data, with the goal of maximizing insight and informing strategic decisions. ### Sr. Data Visualization Engineer (Firefox) @ Mozilla Jan 2012 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, California, United States A member of Mozilla's original Metrics team. Data visualization for the Engineering, Product, and People organizations. Cowrote MetricsGraphics.js, co-created The Firefox Hardware Report, led research investigations of code quality. ### Product Designer @ MIT Media Lab Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Founding member for three projects: http://pantheon.media.mit.edu http://atlas.media.mit.edu http://participie.com ### Research Associate @ Harvard Business School Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States Investigated the sources of bugs in open-source software systems (GNOME) using statistical analyses. ### CEO, Co-Founder @ Skyrill Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 Directed the creative design work on projects that won industry awards; coded and designed Web and software-based projects; completed projects for clients including Adidas, Ogilvy & Mather. Our projects were featured on Behance, Yanko Design, Abduzeedo, FlowingData, Photography Served, Designer's Couch and elsewhere as well as in publications including Fast Company and 3D Artist. ### Research Assistant @ MIT Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 Worked with the IBM Watson Research Center to analyze the architectures of complex software systems by gauging the effectiveness of quantitative metrics developed at MIT in predicting software defects; processed large amounts of disparate data for a large open-source project (GNOME) via static analysis and statistical tools, MATLAB and Perl scripts ### System Development Supervisor @ LMRA Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 Responsible for the development effort on the Expat Management System, a Java/JEE Web Application built in-house aimed at transforming the labor market in Bahrain, by implementing the recommendations of the McKinsey Report. EMS manages the data for half a million expats and integrates with 5 major government systems. I led a team of 27 software developers to produce high-quality releases on schedule, led three large refactoring and data processing projects and worked on codifying a Quality Assurance policy and formalizing LMRA's Software Development Process. ### System Developer @ LMRA Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 Responsible for the development and maintenance of three core modules in EMS; mentored three junior software developers. Projects included: Expat Biometric Data Migration: a project that filtered, normalized and consolidated the biometric data for half a million expats and migrated them to the CIO - the project was covered by the local papers; Monthly Invoices Print File Generation application: a scheduled job that was written using LocalTableReplicator - an abstraction used for speeding up jobs by trading memory for time. ### Owner @ CyberiaPC.com Jan 1999 – Jan 2007 CyberiaPC.com was a hobbyist project that aimed to provide free technical resources in the form of tutorials, articles, help-sheets and applications. Among its more popular features are its Video Game Gallery, its collection of articles and guides and its set of online games (mostly remakes of classics) that have been created by various authors in Flash and Java. CyberiaPC.com's content has been featured in magazines such as PC Answers, .net and PC World, books such as Domine JavaScript, mailing lists such as Lockergnome and on tens of websites. ### Developer @ Zenith Picture Gallery Project Jan 2004 – Jan 2007 A feature-rich picture gallery that I wrote as an alternative to the other free galleries that were available back in 2004. Live demo here: http://www.cyberiapc.com/zenith_demo "This gallery kicks some serious ***. Awesome job for putting it together. I've searched everywhere looking for a gallery that can give us all of our needs, and this one does it all (well, almost...), from ease of use and design, thanks for sharing your great work." -Unoverse.com ### Distributed Systems Technician @ Electronics Data Systems Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 Worked on software projects that included writing an application that migrates data from a legacy system to a newly acquired state-of-the-art one, wrote an application that standardized the names of 2,500 PCs across the organization and wrote a specification for a tool in Z that automated the installation procedures of Oracle middleware and front-end applications. ### Creative Design Intern @ Gulf Saatchi & Saatchi Jan 2003 – Jan 2003 ## Education ### M.S. in Engineering and Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology ### M.S. in Software Engineering Carnegie Mellon University ### B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Systems Engineering University of East Anglia ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/almossawi - Portfolio: https://almossawi.com - Portfolio: https://twitter.com/alialmossawi - Portfolio: https://instagram.com/almossawi --- Source: https://flows.cv/alialmossawi JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alialmossawi/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13