# Kevin Gates > luminousfloatinghead.com Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kevingates As a developer-designer hybrid, I've spent my career in complex domains such as cloud platforms, logistics, and missile defense at Google, Obama 2012, Pivotal and the U.S. Space Force. I'm now focusing on DevEx and AI-native product design, where I see engineering and design roles evolving and merging. If you're building tools for engineers, let's talk. ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Designer @ Rise8 Jan 2025 – Present | Berkeley, California, United States I'm a dual-hat PM/Designer embedded within the U.S. Space Force working on DevEx and cloud-native tools. I led a platform engineering team that modernized legacy micro services used by missile defense apps. My team integrated these services, which had been on-prem and airgapped, with a high-security AWS-based cloud platform, harnessing k8s standards such as Helm charts, and creating a fully modern CLI / TUI (terminal user interface) using Cobra and Bubble Tea. With each on-prem setup costing ~$1M per contractor plus ~$500K in recurring annual costs, our cloud-based solution positioned the Space Force to scale up savings across America's entire missile defense program. ### Writer and Freelance Consultant @ Self-Employed Jan 2015 – Jan 2026 | Berkeley, California, United States I’ve published articles about design, engineering, and AI in UX Magazine, ADP List, Computer World AU, Entwickler.de, Built to Adapt, and UX Bootcamp. I’m a member of UX Magazine's top author community. Between freelance gigs and writing, I design and build apps that explore new territory using LLMs, gesture recognition, speech interfaces, and data visualization (luminousfloatinghead.com). ### Staff Product Designer @ Flexport Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area As lead designer for Flexport’s data platform, I established a lean, agile approach to identifying, scoping and executing design work. This entailed working in compact sprints that fostered collaboration with research, product management and engineering. I led design for the integration of ML automation into ocean shipping schedules. I designed a process for operations teams to manually override problematic schedules (think of a pilot turning off autopilot in bad weather). The design integrated sending reports on poorly generated schedules to Flexport’s data science team, creating a virtuous feedback loop. We reduced manual ML overrides from 8% to 2%. ### Staff Product Designer @ Pivotal Software, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area As a design lead at Pivotal, I guided interdisciplinary teams through large, open-ended problems in the cloud computing space. I led research, facilitated interdisciplinary ideation, and crafted user experiences through rapid prototyping. I led design for several products and feature sets from concept through customer adoption. One product, Pivotal HealthWatch, gained 100 percent traction with the 30+ Fortune-500 customers we tracked. In addition to my design responsibilities, I led hiring for Pivotal's nascent R&D design team in EMEA. I worked closely with recruiters to find candidates who might thrive in a complex, technical domain. I recruited, interviewed and onboarded two principal-level designers. Note: Pivotal was acquired by VMWare in 2020. ### Data Visualization Engineer @ Practice Fusion Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area At Practice Fusion, a healthcare startup backed by Peter Thiel, I designed and built data visualizations as a part of the medical informatics team. I later moved to R&D where I drove new product ideas and designs. ### Deputy, San Francisco Technology Field Office @ Obama for America Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 I wrangled data, organized volunteers, and led the design and development for one of the campaign’s voter-facing apps. The app was released through President Obama’s Twitter account five weeks before election day. ### Business Intelligence @ Google Jan 2006 – Jan 2010 At Google, I was part of a three-person team that created the company’s early sales reporting platform. In 2006, I accepted an offer to join the business intelligence team in London, which in 2009 became Google’s global sales analytics team. ### Data and Reporting Developer @ Google Jan 2004 – Jan 2006 In the early years at Google, three of us built a LAMP-based reporting platform used throughout the company's direct sales teams during Google's rapid growth (2004 - 2009). ### Technologist @ R/GA Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 As a designer-technologist hybrid, I did online branding work for Nike, P&G, BofA, and others. ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kevingatesproduct - Portfolio: https://www.luminousfloatinghead.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/kevingates JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kevingates/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-30