Design Systems
A component library your designers and engineers actually agree on — tokenised, documented, and versioned.
- Token architecture & theming
- Headless component primitives
- Storybook + visual regression
Available for new work — Q3 2026
Alex Morgan
Senior Product Engineer
I design and build the interfaces that carry a product's weight — fast, accessible, and boring to maintain.
- Years shipping
- 9+
- Products delivered
- 40+
- Countries worked with
- 12
- Avg. Lighthouse score
- 98
About
Nine years turning ambiguous briefs into shipped software.
I started as a designer who got tired of handing off files, learned to build, and never went back. Today I work at the seam between design and engineering — the place where most products quietly lose their quality.
My work is mostly frontend architecture for teams that have outgrown their first version: design systems, performance budgets, accessibility remediation, and the unglamorous refactors that make a codebase survivable for the people who inherit it.
I take on three or four engagements a year, work directly with founders and product leads, and prefer projects where I can own an outcome rather than a ticket queue.
What I do
Six ways I tend to be useful.
Most engagements are a blend of these rather than one in isolation. If your problem doesn't fit neatly, that's usually a good sign it's worth a conversation.
Product Engineering
End-to-end feature delivery in React and TypeScript, from the first sketch to the production rollout.
- Next.js / React application builds
- API integration & state design
- Incremental migration strategies
Performance Audits
Find out exactly what is costing you conversions, with a prioritised plan and the patches to fix it.
- Core Web Vitals diagnosis
- Bundle & render-path analysis
- Post-fix verification report
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 AA conformance work that holds up to a real audit, not just an automated scan.
- Manual screen-reader testing
- Keyboard & focus remediation
- Team training & guidelines
Technical Direction
Fractional frontend leadership for teams that need senior judgement without a senior headcount.
- Architecture & tooling decisions
- Code review & mentoring
- Hiring support and rubrics
Interface Design
Interface work for products that need to look considered, from a person who has to build it afterwards.
- Product UI & interaction design
- Prototyping in code
- Motion & micro-interaction specs
Selected work
Four projects that are representative of the rest.
Client names and figures are illustrative in this template. Under NDA the same case studies work with the company anonymised — the numbers are what people actually read.
- 2025 · Lead Frontend Engineer
Meridian Analytics
Rebuilt a 400-screen B2B analytics suite on a shared component foundation, replacing four divergent internal UI libraries.
62% faster feature delivery, 190kB smaller initial bundle
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- Radix
- 2024 · Design Systems Consultant
Halcyon Bank
Designed and shipped the token architecture and primitive layer behind a retail banking app used by 1.2M customers.
Full WCAG 2.2 AA conformance across 90 screens
- React
- Style Dictionary
- Storybook
- 2024 · Performance Lead
Northwind Commerce
Six-week engagement to fix a storefront that was losing mobile customers to a 4.8s largest contentful paint.
LCP 4.8s → 1.3s, +18% mobile checkout rate
- Next.js
- Edge Runtime
- Cloudflare
- 2023 · Product Engineer
Atlas Field Ops
An offline-first inspection tool for field engineers working in places with no signal and cold, gloved hands.
Adopted by 2,400 technicians in 11 countries
- React
- IndexedDB
- PWA
- Mapbox
Experience
Where I've been, and what changed while I was there.
Freelance Product Engineer
Independent
2023 — Present · Berlin · Remote
Selective frontend engagements for scale-ups and agencies across fintech, logistics, and developer tooling.
- Delivered 14 engagements with a 100% on-time completion record
- Built the design system now used by three separate product teams at Meridian
- Retained by two clients on ongoing advisory contracts
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- Node
Staff Frontend Engineer
Kestrel Labs
2021 — 2023 · Berlin, Germany
Technical owner of the web platform for a developer-tooling company through Series B and a 4× headcount increase.
- Led the migration of a 180k-line codebase from CRA to Next.js with zero downtime
- Cut median page interaction latency from 340ms to 90ms
- Established the frontend hiring rubric and interviewed 60+ candidates
- React
- Next.js
- GraphQL
- Turborepo
Senior Interface Engineer
Fathom Studio
2019 — 2021 · Amsterdam, Netherlands
Client-facing engineer at a 20-person product studio, shipping flagship launches for European consumer brands.
- Shipped 11 client products, six of which are still in production today
- Introduced the studio's accessibility standard and trained the delivery team
- Ran the design-to-code handoff process across four concurrent projects
- React
- Vue
- SCSS
- GSAP
Frontend Developer
Bright Harbour
2017 — 2019 · Manchester, UK
First engineering role, building marketing sites and internal tools for a mid-size agency.
- Rebuilt the agency's component toolkit, halving new-project setup time
- Maintained 30+ client sites with a shared deployment pipeline
- JavaScript
- Sass
- WordPress
Skills
The tools I reach for, and how well I actually know them.
Self-assessed and deliberately honest — the 70s are there because pretending otherwise wastes everyone's first week.
Core
TypeScript95%
React95%
Next.js90%
CSS / Tailwind92%
Platform
Node.js80%
Cloudflare Workers78%
PostgreSQL70%
CI / CD82%
Craft
Accessibility90%
Performance88%
Design systems94%
Figma85%
Day-to-day toolkit
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Radix UI
- Node.js
- tRPC
- GraphQL
- Playwright
- Vitest
- Storybook
- Turborepo
- Cloudflare
- PostgreSQL
- Figma
- GSAP
Achievements
Recognition, talks, and things I'm quietly pleased about.
2025
Awwwards Site of the Day
Awwwards
Recognised for the Meridian Analytics marketing platform, judged on design, usability and creativity.
2024
Speaker — React Summit
React Summit, Amsterdam
Talk on incremental design-system adoption in large legacy codebases, delivered to ~1,800 attendees.
2024
CSS Design Awards — Best UI
CSSDA
Awarded for interface work on the Halcyon Bank retail application redesign.
2022
Open Source — 4.2k stars
GitHub
Author of a widely used headless table primitive for React, downloaded 80k times per month.
Testimonials
What the people who hired me said afterwards.
“Alex joined a project that three agencies had already failed to land, and had a working, tested slice in production inside two weeks. The difference was judgement, not speed.”
Dana WhitfieldVP Product, Meridian Analytics “The design system is the single best investment we made that year. Two years on it is still the foundation of everything we ship, and it has needed almost no maintenance.”
Tomas RehakHead of Design, Halcyon Bank “Rare combination — genuinely strong engineering, and the only contractor we've had who wrote documentation nobody had to ask for. Our team was faster after the engagement ended.”
Priya RaghunathanCTO, Northwind Commerce
Contact
Let's talk about your project.
I reply to every enquiry within one business day. If it isn't a fit, I'll usually be able to point you at someone who is.
- Emailhello@alexmorgan.dev
- Phone+49 30 5555 0142
- LocationBerlin, Germany · CET / UTC+1
Typical reply: under 24 hours
Available for new work — Q3 2026. For anything urgent, email is faster than the form.