Iri Hoxha
Design Engineer with 10+ years of experience building products from zero to one — from brand identity and UX through to production frontend code. I’ve been the founding designer at two startups, shipping across B2B platforms, mobile apps, and hardware interfaces, and I now work at the intersection of design and engineering where I design, prototype, and implement. He/him.
Skills
| Design | Product Design, Prototyping, Animation, Design Systems, Brand Development |
| Engineering | TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, React, Vue, Nuxt, Astro, Git, Cypress |
| AI | AI-assisted design and development, Cursor, Claude, agentic workflows |
| Software | Figma, Framer, Adobe Creative Suite, Webflow, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Rive, Maya |
| Languages | English, Albanian, Italian (certified), basic French & Spanish |
Experience
Founding Product Designer, then Design Engineer at Swayable, Jan 2020—Today
Swayable is a B2B research technology platform that uses scientific rigor and AI to measure how media content shifts human opinion. I joined as the company’s first dedicated designer and built out the design practice — product UX, design system, brand identity, keynotes and marketing materials — while keeping a team of 4–9 engineers supplied with high-quality specs without ever becoming a bottleneck. Over five years the role evolved into a hybrid Designer-Engineer — described by leadership as a “force multiplier” for the team: I now ship production code alongside design, with ~130 merged pull requests in the past year making me one of the top contributors to the codebase.
- Designed and helped ship a global Product Navigation overhaul — led all strategic design from wireframes and prototyping through a modern visual system, implemented much of the frontend code; major clients now describe the core product UX as “one of Swayable’s competitive advantages”
- Embraced the company’s top strategic priority — AI-native product development — and designed and helped deliver a suite of client-requested AI features: AI-generated Slides (led end-to-end including first back-end API work), AI summarization of user responses, and Toplines.
- Designed and helped ship a stream of core UX upgrades: Benchmarks experience, redesigned Home and Comments pages, Custom Baselines
- Became the team’s early adopter and evangelizer of AI-assisted planning, prototyping and coding — authored Cursor rules, commands and workflows adopted and perfected by senior engineers
- Established front-end QA ownership across all front-end releases, improving product polish and fixing dozens of UI/UX bugs on core product UX surfaces
- Created the design system from the ground up, standardizing components across every surface in collaboration with engineers, and sometimes implementing them directly in the codebase with 1:1 design-to-code fidelity
- Contributed beyond product — led a brand identity refresh, produced design keynotes for Cannes Lions, SxSW, Persuasion and Netroots conferences, and delivered blog illustrations, client-facing renderings, and sales materials
Founding Designer, then VP of Design at HEVO Inc., Oct 2016—Aug 2019
HEVO is a Brooklyn-based B2B technology company building wireless charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and autonomous fleets. I joined as the company’s first designer and built the entire design practice from a blank canvas — brand identity, product experience, marketing, and investor materials. Over nearly three years I shipped the core product suite, collaborated with hardware engineers on patented innovations, and produced the materials that helped secure funding rounds. Promoted to VP of Design in 2018, I helped to more than double the size of the software and design team, owned design budgets and delivery milestones, and led the product through its first live deployments with automotive OEMs.
- Designed and shipped the HEVO Dashboard from initial alpha through beta and a user-feedback-driven redesign, extending it from desktop to mobile and tablet for field testing with business clients and OEMs
- Designed and helped ship the beta release the HEVO mobile app on iOS and Android, and redesigned the company website with improved load times and user flow
- Built the company’s brand identity from scratch and scaled it across every touchpoint — products, website, trade show materials, and investor decks
- Co-authored 3 design patents for unique hardware features with the engineering team; applications pending
- Directed external animation and video production teams to deliver commercials from storyboard to final cut
Earlier Experience (2010—2017)
My first formative experience as a designer began in 2010, when I co-founded InfoMedia Albania with Hasan Hallulli — an independent digital media company covering television, media and entertainment for an Albanian-speaking audience.
Over the course of 5 years, I taught myself the Adobe suite, learned to write professionally, and learned to grow an audience in the early days of social media. I designed the brand, produced video content, wrote articles and researched television ratings data for publication. We grew the social following to over 50K on Facebook, the site ranked among the top 200 most-visited websites in Albania, and our reporting was featured by Italian public broadcaster RAI, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, and the European Journalism Observatory.
After moving to the United States, I took on a series of roles while completing my bachelor’s degree — each one sharpening a different edge of my design practice.
At Giant Films NYC, a film production studio in Brooklyn led by producer Joshua Teicher, I started as a web design intern and built the studio’s first website in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, staying on part-time to manage their web content.
At SO Architecture, I worked closely with architect Sean O’Brien to craft documentation for the studio’s projects — 3D-rendered graphics, detailed floor plans, portfolio trade books, project proposals and navigational diagrams. It was here that I developed a strong appreciation for visual minimalism and typography.
At Alexapath, a medical technology company focused on making diagnostic imaging affordable and accessible, I collaborated with developers to design product packaging and a dashboard interface that allowed doctors to live-stream microscopic feeds from across the globe.
At The ALIX Experience, an international membership organization and luxury travel concierge for professional women, I worked with the CEO Suzanne Randolph to design the company’s website and mobile app experience produced marketing materials, integrated a payment and billing system, and managed the membership database.
Education
Bachelor of Technology in Communication Design at NYC College of Technology
2013—2017 · Magna Cum Laude Graduated with honors. Several of my works were featured in the Grace Gallery, a curated exhibition of the department’s strongest work. In 2016 I was First Runner-Up at the annual CUNY Public Speaking Competition. Through the Beyond Coding Fellowship with the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, I worked alongside industry leaders from Stack Overflow, Trello, Foursquare, Tumblr and Kickstarter in a 10-week program focused on technical communication, Agile workflows, and production-ready engineering practices. I was also inducted into the National Society of Leadership & Success.