# Erik Burns > Agentic AI · Product, Design & Engineering Lead · Creating Human-Centered Systems at Scale Location: Santa Cruz, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/erikburns I build systems that change what people do. My path has spanned neuroscience research, clinical hypnotherapy, and enterprise and consumer product design at Apple, Intuit, Realtor.com, and Capital One. I also founded Healify, a behavioral health startup. Each field offered me a different lens into the same question: what does it actually take to shift human behavior? I still don't have a complete answer. But I've gotten closer with every project. Right now I'm building HabitualOS, an agentic AI platform I use every day to prototype new patterns for how humans and agents work together. My focus is building systems that offload operational complexity to AI so humans can focus on creativity, throughput, and impact. If you're actively building in this space or looking for someone who can shape organizational vision but also get their hands dirty, I'd love to connect. ## Work Experience ### Product Lead, Agentic AI @ HabitualOS Jan 2025 – Present | Santa Cruz County, CA HabitualOS is an open-source agentic AI platform, built and used daily to explore how AI agents can handle operational work while preserving human judgment and agency. It serves as both a personal research environment and a modular prototyping kit for shipping agentic apps fast. Technologies: - Claude API (tool use, structured outputs, prompt caching) - Multi-agent orchestration, long-context memory - Node.js, Netlify Functions, Firestore - Semantic indexing, embeddings - 11ty, Markdown, local-first architecture ### Head of Product / Founder @ Healify, Inc. Jan 2020 – Present | Berkeley, CA Healify is a privacy-first behavioral science platform that enables therapists and clients to meaningfully measure progress. It has served over one million mood data points since its inception and driven a ~260% increase in reported client satisfaction. In 2024, I stepped away from active development to work directly with 100+ clients as a somatic therapist, treating chronic pain, anxiety, and stress through hypnotherapy and nervous system regulation. That clinical experience drove a full rebuild of the platform in 2025, grounding the product in real therapeutic practice rather than just theory. Highlights: - Built and led cross-functional teams in design, engineering, data science, and content - Championed a privacy-first data model that increased trust and decreased compliance costs - Conducted hundreds of user interviews to inform customer-driven product decisions - Designed onboarding, assessment, and behavioral tracking experiences - Scaled engagement to over one million moods served ### Lead UX Designer, Strategy @ Tangible Jan 2016 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, Ca Tangible is a leading San Francisco UX strategy and design thinking consultancy. At Tangible, I worked with a wide range of clients, establishing customer-driven design processes and delivering successful product solutions from concept to detailed design and development hand-off. - Capital One: Increased client ROI by 300% with novel B2B credit app - Intuit: QuickBooks redesign decreased calls to support center by 20% (impact award) - Apple: Accounts payable platform (details proprietary to client) ### Lead UX Designer, Growth @ Realtor.com Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Santa Clara, California, United States Realtor.com is the 2nd leading real estate portal in the US. I was responsible for the lead generation experience, and for creating new channels and services for home buyers, and helped drive a double-digit lift to the core business, where growth had been stagnant for 10+ years. - Produced a 14% lift in paid customer conversions ($45M incremental revenue) - Invented Peek home tours app, a global impact award winner (innovation award) - Led design for new business & lead generation for the company's flagship app ### Principal Designer @ Erik Burns Interactive Jan 2010 – Jan 2016 | Santa Cruz, Ca Erik Burns Interactive (www.erikburns.com) is my professional technology consultancy, where I have provided design strategy, product management, and development services for select clients. My clients have included Xerox, PARC, Symantec, Webex, Citrix, TradeYa, and Zurb. - TradeYa: Secured $200K A-list seed with lean MVP barter platform - PARC: Generated a 12% increase in revenue for LADOT solution - Zurb: Delivered JS prototype — 250,000+ impressions first week of launch ### Director of User Experience @ YouSendIt Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Campbell, Ca YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com) is a leading provider of cloud computing, storage, and business collaboration solutions. I was the first User Experience Director at YouSendIt, and managed product design for our entire suite of mobile, web, and desktop applications. During that time, YouSendIt grew from 80 to 200 employees and was featured in Inc. Magazine's top 500 fastest-growing companies. My 4-person team led interaction design, visual design, and user testing. - ‎Directed design of Yahoo! Mail app that doubled YouSendIt's active user base - Co-designed YouSendIt iPad app that received a Webby Honoree Award 2011 - Built a 4-person team spanning interaction design, visual design, & user testing - Delivered over 15 products to market, helping contribute to 60% YOY growth ### User Experience Engineer @ YouSendIt Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Campbell, Ca Highlights: - Delivered our first cloud storage solution, competing with DropBox & Box.net - ‎‏‏‎Rewrote a bug-ridden ExtJS app in more accessible native HTML, CSS3, and JS ‎ - Improved web app performance, decreasing load times from 15 sec to < 5 sec- ### Product Lead / Co-Founder @ xBrowse Inc. Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Santa Cruz, CA xBrowse (www.xbrowse.com) is a cross-browser testing solution designed to help ease the pain of cross-browser development for web designers and front-end engineers. As the co-founder, I led the product design and development from concept to release. I also drove business development, promoting our API platform and end-user adoption. We served 250,000+ tests in our first year of release. - Co-created xBrowse concept & launched in 3 months as part of a two-man team - Headed product design, spanning interaction, visual brand, and marketing - Coded the app front-end in HTML/CSS/JS and the back-end in PHP/MySQL - Led business development generating 250,000+ tests in our first year of launch ### Lead User Experience Designer @ Mozes, Inc. Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Palo Alto, Ca Mozes (www.mozes.com) is a leader in mobile marketing, used every day by some of the world’s best-loved bands, brands, and sports teams to build relationships with their fans through the mobile phone. While at Mozes, I led the front-end design and engineering of Mozes Connect, the company’s flagship product line. - Led design of Mozes Connect, a mobile marketing platform for over 4MM fans - Designed and built new mobile campaigns (Text2Win, Pics2Screen), helping establish Mozes as the undisputed leader in mobile marketing for music fans - Drove user-centric design with tools such as Google Analytics, UserFly, and UserVoice ### Lead User Interface Engineer @ Mozes, Inc. Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 | Palo Alto, Ca Highlights: - Co-rewrote Mozes's entire web application using JQuery and CSS grids ### Co-Founder, Designer, Developer @ Multiple Projects Jan 2003 – Jan 2008 | Los Altos, Ca I cut my teeth as an entrepreneur working on a variety of consumer-facing web projects with a good friend of mine from Stanford. The most notable were BumpQ, an events and entertainment search engine that allowed people to "bump" ideas to their friends, and VoiceFire (www.voicefire.org), a global survey engine for people to voice their opinions about relevant political topics. These projects developed my entrepreneurial business acumen, and greatly honed my skills as a designer and front-end engineer. ### Information Architect, Producer @ Gotomedia, Inc. Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 | San Francisco, Ca Gotomedia (www.gotomedia.com) is an award-winning San Francisco web design firm specializing in user research, usability, and interaction design. While working as a consultant with Gotomedia, I served in a wide range of user experience design roles for global technology clients, from information architect, to copywriter, to web producer. ### Web Designer @ Independent Contractor Jan 2002 – Jan 2004 | San Francisco, Ca ### Web Content Manager @ Affymetrix (Bioinformatics) Jan 2001 – Jan 2002 | Santa Clara, Ca ### Project Manager @ Neomorphic (Bioinformatics) Jan 1999 – Jan 2001 | Emeryville, Ca ## Education ### B.S. in Biological Sciences (honors and distinction) Stanford University ### University of Pennsylvania ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/erikburns - Website: https://erikburns.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/erikburns JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/erikburns/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-08