I'm Samia, Head of Design at Render, a cloud platform that makes it radically simpler to build, deploy, and run apps.

I lead product design and brand, and right now that mostly means raising the quality bar; building shared judgment across engineering, product, and design about what good looks like and what shouldn't ship. I'm also building a design engineering practice here, something I started at GitHub when I helped launch the Design Engineer job family as part of a new career ladder, during my stint as interim Head of Design there. I also ran GitHub's Core UX, where we improved high-usage surfaces regularly and met Microsoft's accessibility bar across everything we shipped.

Before that, Nike, where I built the enterprise design function from three people to thirty and launched a design system now supporting 130+ products. Earlier, Unity, where I did a lot of 0-to-1 work, hands-on and managing, during the wild stretch when we all thought the metaverse was "it". The throughline is complexity: I can take something genuinely hard and hand it back understandable, calmly, and usually simpler than I found it.

Twenty-plus years in, I still believe infrastructure exists to serve the product experience and not the other way around. A design system earns its keep when it speeds people up without boxing them in (easy to contribute to, accessibility already handled). Lately the same logic points at AI, which is a good part of what I'm thinking about now.

The path here wasn't linear. I freelanced through New Orleans, Seattle, and New York, ran a small studio of my own in the East Village, then joined Cuban Council and worked with great brands and companies like Francis Ford Coppola's winery, Shinola, Zola, Zendesk, Google, NASA, Davines, and Steven Alan (we literally worked across everything, and I believe good designers still can). When Google acquired us I didn't go; I went to Techstars as a Hackstar instead, then wanted to build something of my own, so I spent a year co-founding Karta, a social mapping startup about sharing experiences around places, where I ran product and engineering alongside design to get us to MVP. That year took me to the West Coast, and I've been here since.

I now live in Laguna Beach with my partner and our three girls (I'm a bonus parent), and I'm usually trying to bake something overly ambitious, glued to my computer on exciting days, planning the next trip, or being bossed around by our two French bulldogs, Flora and Fern.