# Derek Gulbranson > Principal Product Designer · AI-Native Design Systems & Enterprise UX · Apple | Architecting the tools that make designers and developers faster Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/derekgulbranson I design complex enterprise systems, and the AI-native tooling that powers them. At Apple, I lead interaction design for Bridge Design System, the component library and guidance platform behind 165+ internal applications. Over the past year I've built a parallel infrastructure alongside that work: a multi-repository GitHub ecosystem that transforms how Bridge guidance is created, validated, and distributed to developers. What that looks like in practice: * A Claude Code plugin published to Apple's internal marketplace. Bridge guidance and design tokens for 40+ components embedded directly in developer AI workflows, zero configuration required. * a Playwright/TypeScript compliance framework with automated bug filing, dark mode/RTL coverage, and an AI-generated test pipeline that uses a multi-agent Claude Code skill to turn test plans into working Playwright specs. * A 6-repository GitHub ecosystem with automated content pipelines, AI context infrastructure (CLAUDE.md, 44-element YAML registry, design token CSVs), and a portable, versioned AI context file distributed to any AI tool without configuration. Before this: I led the UX team for Apple's internal enterprise authentication platform serving 160,000+ employees across iOS, macOS, and web. Built and managed a 6-person design team, shipped the v6.0 Unified UI SwiftUI redesign, and drove measurable outcomes: 93% reduction in authentication support calls, device approval satisfaction from 45% → 87%. My work sits at the intersection of design systems, AI tooling, and enterprise security. I also write code. I was the first engineering hire at Mingle and built their initial Django stack. I built python-nameparser, a Python library with 700+ GitHub stars that ships in Ubuntu. That background is fuels my AI tooling and design work. I can build the infrastructure myself, help teammates develop their own AI coding skills, give genuinely grounded feedback on implementation decisions, and bridge the communication gap between engineering and design. Open to conversations about design systems leadership, AI-integrated design workflows, and principal/staff IC roles. ## Work Experience ### Interaction Design Lead, Bridge Design System @ Apple Jan 2024 – Present | Sunnyvale, California, United States Lead interaction design strategy for Bridge, Apple's enterprise design system powering 165+ internal applications across web, macOS, and iOS. Alongside hands-on guidance authorship, I've spent the past year building the AI-native infrastructure that powers how Bridge works: AI Tooling & Infrastructure Built and published bridge-claude-plugin to Apple's internal Claude Code marketplace — embedding Bridge guidance and design tokens for 40+ components directly in developer AI workflows, zero configuration required. Architected a 6-repository GitHub ecosystem with automated content-fetch pipelines, a 44-element YAML registry, design token CSVs, and portable AI context files used by any AI tool. Automated Compliance Testing Initiated and lead bridge-assessments — a Playwright/TypeScript framework automating Bricks component library compliance against Bridge specifications. Integrated Apple Radar for automated bug filing. Built dark mode, RTL, and AI-generated test coverage (a multi-agent Claude Code skill that turns test plans into Playwright specs). 171+ commits, 6 components covered. Thought Leadership Presented "Bridge and GenAI" to IS&T UX Platform leadership (January 2026) — demonstrated RAG-based guidance queries, proposed a Bridge MCP server with 6 tools, and introduced the Design Process Assistant vision. Generated organizational investment in AI-integrated design workflows. Guidance Authorship Authored 2 new Bridge elements (Chat UI, Menus) and led major revisions of Buttons, Data Tables, and Tokens. Published 21 changelog entries in 10 months. Pioneered a shift from prescriptive rules to principle-based guidance across 40+ components. Continued as sole UX resource for AppleConnect post-team layoff — shipped Bluetooth Proximity Approval and Session Management for 160,000+ users while mentoring engineers directly on UX decision-making. ### Design Lead, Identity Management Systems UX Team @ Apple Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Led the UX team for Apple's internal enterprise authentication and identity platform serving 350,000+ employees and external partners across iOS, macOS, and web. Team & Process Built and led a 6-person UX team (designers, a UX writer, and a producer). Established the team's collaboration infrastructure from scratch: weekly engineering sync cadence, Chorus documentation site (viewed 700+ times by management), InVision screenshot repository, and keyword tagging strategy for design decisions. Measurable Impact Reduced enterprise authentication support burden by 93% (2,800 → 200 monthly support calls). Increased device approval satisfaction from 45% to 87%. Platform Strategy Led the "Unified UI" initiative — a ground-up SwiftUI redesign consolidating fragmented macOS and iOS authentication experiences into a single cohesive platform. Ran two rounds of user research, managed a team of 3 designers across both clients, and drove engineering alignment through 12 months of design reviews. Features Shipped FIDO2/YubiKey support · Apple Badge redesign · PIPL/TOS consent flows · iOS/macOS Sign-In redesign · OnboardingKit integration · Multi-factor authentication · Device approval workflows · Web SSO sign-out Stakeholder Alignment Collaborated across 5+ engineering teams. Presented to UX and engineering leadership at Apple four times over two years. ### Senior Product Designer (Contractor) @ Apple Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Sunnyvale, California, United States Embedded product designer within Apple's Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) UX team, designing internal enterprise tools used by Apple employees worldwide. Led end-to-end design of Apple's enterprise procurement platform, transforming a cumbersome purchasing workflow into a consumer-grade experience for Apple hardware and software procurement. Redesigned the portal used by Apple developers to sign and distribute internal software. Reduced documentation dependency by 80% by rethinking the publishing mental model from the ground up. Eliminated a major source of developer support burden. Design System & Process Established design patterns and component usage across multiple internal enterprise applications, contributing to early Bridge design system development. Pioneered an embedded design approach within engineering teams, shifting from waterfall handoffs to collaborative, iterative design-development cycles. ### Lead Product Designer @ Lithium Technologies Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Owned and shipped platform features for Lithium's community platform, serving Fortune 500 brands connecting millions of customers with brand communities. Influenced product roadmap through customer research and stakeholder presentations, securing engineering investment for critical UX improvements. Simultaneously supported 3 agile engineering teams, identifying and resolving UX issues during implementation. Designed and shipped Lithium's iOS SDK enabling B2B customers to embed community experiences in their mobile applications. ### Senior UX Designer @ Cisco Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area As a part of Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) group I worked to design several customer listening post experiences to measure the ease, effectiveness and emotion of customer interactions with Cisco's Support team. ### Lead Product Designer @ MetaBrite Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, California Transformed company product and business strategy through user research, identifying unexplored market demand that altered the company's strategic direction. Integrated iterative, research-led design into the existing agile development workflow, with user testing protocols before each sprint. Designed cross-platform mobile interfaces for Android and iOS. Designed RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) experiences enabling users to train a machine learning system for grocery receipt recognition and product identification. ### Principal @ Derek Gulbranson Consulting Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Cairo, Egypt Based in Cairo, Egypt, worked remotely with Bay Area start-ups while studying Arabic and exploring Middle-eastern culture. Conducted remote user research, designed web application and e-commerce interfaces and created online marketing collateral. Clients included Breathometer, The Orange Chef, and Pacific Arabic. ### User Experience Director @ HubPages Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco, CA A former coworker from Plum District introduced me to the HubPages team. HubPages is a online publishing platform that provides content creators with a simple way to monetize their content. It ranks among the 100 most-visited sites on the internet. The HubPages team was looking to refocus their large, active online community of writers on content quality as well as make the writer experience on HubPages more user friendly. The challenge was to quickly navigate 5 years worth of technical and design debt to identify changes and features with the greatest potential impact on our goals and provide a cohesive, recognizable and desirable brand experience while taking care to nurture the existing, passionate online community. I performed in-person and online focus groups with community members to help myself and the team better understand the true nature and goals of their online community. I initiated a new iterative, design process that showed early wireframes of the team’s new feature ideas to community members. I reviewed video clips of user feedback with the team and created increasingly refined designs as we discovered what did and didn’t work. I used this process to successfully launch several new features and UI changes that were well received by the HubPages community and team. I greatly enjoyed my experience at HubPages because I felt my contributions were able to truly have a positive impact on the direction of the product and experience of its passionate online community. ### Sr User Interface Designer @ Plum District Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | San Francicso, CA I joined Plum District as their sole in-house designer shortly after their Series A from Kleiner Perkins. I was lucky enough to participate in the company's rebranding project led by the very talented guys at Think Brand New. It was my first experience with a full, agency-led brand ideation process and I learned a lot from the experience. In addition to several internal branding ideation sessions, I attend several customer focus groups and got to listen to moms across America talk about why they bought daily deals. Plum District's brand had 3 different customers; the consumer, the vendor, and the sales team. After the initial rebranding project I helped the team implement the new brand across all of our customer and sales team touch points, which included multiple internal and external web properties as well as print collateral, sales training and event materials. I also designed Plum District's mobile web purchase flow and interface. After Plum District was chosen by Disney to provide their daily deals platform I helped guide Disney's Interactive Media team in the application of their brand's visual design to Plum District's deals platform. Plum District was my first experience with a big VC-backed startup. It provided me with the opportunity to work with a large number of very talented people and I'm very grateful for the experience. I learned a lot. ### Lead Designer/Developer @ Mingle, LLC Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | San Francisco, CA Mingle was an online dating site. I was their first hire and worked with them to design and build the initial site prototype. We then grew the team to 5 developers and a second designer and built out a full-featured online dating site with social networking elements. Mingle was my first start-up experience as well as my first full-time job after being happily self-employed for many years. I really enjoyed the close knit team that we formed and the experience of building a product from scratch. ### Founder @ Email Signature Tool Jan 2005 – Jan 2009 While consulting for several large, global law firms in San Francisco I repeatedly had clients ask me for a solution to the problem of providing a company-wide, branded and standardized email signature. We were all weary of self-created magenta signatures in Comic Sans and knew that they were a missed opportunity to convey the brand, but there were really no good technology solutions available. I would end up building one-off solutions that would fill the client's immediate need. As these solutions grew more robust and full-featured, I eventually turned it into a product that I could market and sell on its own. I designed the Windows (WinForm) application that installed the company's branded email signature and contracted with an amazing Windows developer that helped me build it. I also designed and built the marketing site and web-based administration interface using Ruby on Rails (v2.0). The email signature templates were XSL that could be updated via a web-based administration panel. Company office locations were also centrally managed. Users could see their signature as they typed and choose among several configurable design options. The XSL templates provided and incredible amount of power and flexibility to customize signatures for specific locations or working groups. The product worked great. Clients loved it and I believe some still use it even today. I funded this venture entirely with my own time and capital and, although it was profitable for me, I learned that there are many operational aspects to starting and running a business that I do not enjoy. I also learned that attracting a talented team to help you is a lot easier when you have a product that's more interesting than corporate email signatures. And I also learned quite a bit about the problems involved with deploying company-wide branded email signatures and, to my knowledge, that problem has still not been solved. Feel free to contact me if you would like to explore ideas for solutions. ### Lead Designer/Developer @ replyforall.com Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | San Francisco, CA Reply for All was an innovative start-up with a interesting business proposition for creating new, high-engagement advertising real estate using personal email signatures. Users could insert their Reply for All email signature using our Firefox, Internet Explorer or MS Outlook extensions or by copy and pasting HTML. The email signature included an ad, and a portion of the proceeds from that ad would be donated to a charitable cause of your choice. Enmi found me on LinkedIn through my expertise in HTML email. After I helped her solve some tricky email-related problems we quickly developed a great working relationship and I convinced her to let me completely re-implement the initial prototype in Python Django. We continued working through several iterations of the product's sign up flow and installation process as well as producing a complete library of over 300 signature template and design options combinations. ### Consultant - Interactive Design & Development @ Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP Jan 2003 – Jan 2009 | San Francisco, CA I worked on a consultant basis with the Creative Services team at Orrick for many years after I first moved to San Francisco. Orrick is a large, international law firm with over 1,500 lawyers and 10,000 employees world-wide. I initially began working on simple graphic design projects but quickly began assisting on a wide range of more complex projects, from HTML email design and delivery to user interfaces for internal web applications. One of my more substantial contributions was the design and implementation of Orrick's email newsletter subscription experience, which included the complete interaction cycle for production and delivery of the entire firm's email newsletter content. Email delivery utilized Tikit's E-Merge and ReAction Server software and was seamlessly integrated with the Orrick's existing CRM (InterAction). When Orrick moved their IT services to West Virginia, I trained the new team how to use and maintain the system. ### UI/UX Consultant @ BitSpark Consulting Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Oakland, CA A friend from university started a small software development consulting firm in the East Bay. Their work doesn't normally include user interfaces, but when they had a client that needed a user interface for their new inventory exchange feature they asked for my help to design a new web-based user interface. The client was so pleased with our work that they asked me to help them design an new web-based interface for their flagship application which still sported an out-dated, terminal-based AS400 interface. I organized and moderated a user-research event where the company flew 12 power users to Portland, Oregon. I had each user walk me through their workflow with the current application and explain how they used the interface and each of the pieces of information it provided. In addition to a detailed list of usability recommendations, I utilized on online rapid-prototyping tool to provide an annotated, clickable wireframe of the application's 3 most important interfaces. (Examples included in my online portfolio.) ### UI/UX and Technology Consultant @ Heller Ehrman Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 | San Francisco, CA I worked with Heller Ehrman's IT services and creative departments on the design of several internal web-based applications, including their Sharepoint-based corporate intranet. I designed and implemented the interface and user flow for their deployment of Tikit's E-Merge and ReAction Server email newsletter delivery system. I also worked with their creative team to develop new corporate branding and identity materials for numerous internal and external brands and divisions. ### Freelance Graphic and Web Designer @ DLA Piper US LLP Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 Collaborated in development of new corporate branding, identity materials and brand standard documentation for internal and external corporate brands and sub-brands. Designed and produced new HTML email newsletter designs. Consulted on implementation of new commercial email sending solution. Produced new front-end templates for existing web applications, including internal Sharepoint-based intranet site as well as InterAction CRM web client. ### Aircraft Interior Designer @ Wendy Ulve Design Associates Jan 2001 – Jan 2003 I met Wendy while working at The Jet Center in Santa Barbara and we formed a great working relationship and life-long friendship. I worked with Wendy on many projects ranging from Gulfstream IV to 747s. For a typical project I would work with Wendy to create an initial series of design concepts and options for the client, source fabric, materials and custom components and oversee their production and delivery, produce a complete interior design drawing package using AutoCAD as well as 2D or 3D illustrations of the aircraft interior and exterior design concepts. During completion of the interior I would travel to the completion center to provide on-site design oversight of the completion process on the customer's behalf. I also built her web site. ### Aircraft Interior Designer @ The Jet Center Jan 1999 – Jan 2001 | Santa Barbara, CA The Jet Center built interiors for the Boeing Business Jet, a 737 with a custom configuration for use as a private VIP aircraft. After The Jet Center was acquired by General Electric, GE moved me from my position at the completion center in Springfield, IL to Santa Barbara, CA where I help set up and run their in-house design facilities. I served as the intermediary between the customer's flight team and designer and the internal engineering, FAA certification and project planning teams. I helped the client's designer understand and navigate the limitations of aircraft regulations and physics. I helped design and oversee the production and delivery of high-end luxury materials and custom components (things like gold-plated bidets make from fiberglass honeycomb and custom LED lighting to decorate the shower interior like a night sky). I worked with flight teams to design high-end galleys that were functional, durable, and beautiful. My favorite project was an interior done completely in a high-end art deco motif designed by one of France's premier interior designers for the extremely wealthy. I dedicated two years of my life to its completion but, sadly, I never got to fly in it. ### Graphic Artist @ Garrett Aviation Jan 1996 – Jan 1999 | Springfield, IL Produced photorealistic 3D renderings of aircraft interiors and interior components. Produced 2D illustrations of interiors, custom components and avionics display modifications. Produced countless aircraft exterior paint scheme designs. Produced printed marketing materials and small internal website. ## Education ### BFA in Photography University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ### Photography University of Wolverhampton ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/derekgulbranson - Portfolio: http://derekgulbranson.com/?li --- Source: https://flows.cv/derekgulbranson JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/derekgulbranson/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13