David Townsend

Full-stack design engineer 2025 to Present

• Own large feature projects from brief to iteration. Designed and built the data sheets bulk-import system, shipped as thirty small reviewed steps with no customer-visible half-state.
• Built and ran the QA Reviewer, an agentic AI pull-request reviewer adopted across the engineering team from launch, with a feedback loop that measures how engineers respond to every report.
• Built Prototype Lane so designers can ship prototypes into a shared preview environment safely, and cut preview deploys from eight minutes to six.
• Extended the design system with enforced empty states across 47 tables, a table fullscreen mode, and modal guidance.

Product designer, founding 2022 to 2025

• Founded the product design function and helped create the Product team.
• Created the bespoke design system and the in-product design guide that documents it.
• Led designer education and structured a design process tightly integrated with product and engineering flows.
• Owned research, wireframes, prototypes and high-fidelity design for desktop and mobile across a complex financial domain.

Software engineer, founding 2015 to 2022

• Co-authored the back-end systems that power an FCA-regulated equity platform. PHP, Laravel, MySQL, AWS.
• Built front-end systems in Vue that scaled from a handful of screens to hundreds.
• Led business-wide projects beyond engineering, including a CRM integration and IT support, and covered customer service when needed.

Web developer 2012 to 2015

• Built client websites and applications at a design agency. Vestd began as a client project here, my first with Laravel and Angular.