Design Engineer & Product Designer, building AI-native products at early-stage startups. New York, USA.
Vasudev Menon is a design engineer and product designer who works with early-stage startups. He ships end to end, from product design and frontend to the AI systems underneath: agents, MCP, model routing, and evals.
He cares about products that feel calm, exact, and considered: fewer things, better choices. He works best with teams that treat design and engineering as one craft.
Built Highlight's AI backbone from zero: model router, classification, eval harness, and a memory system with semantic search and local-to-remote sync. Owned onboarding UX end to end, stood up the support pipeline, and built the entire visual identity: announcement site, brand motif, launch video, motion.
Independent AI consulting for fitness and healthcare. Shipped multiple AI apps, including a study assistant that drew 100+ beta users on day one.
Led web design and setup tooling for SmartSocks, a health wearable. Cut device startup time ~50% through onboarding automation, shipped diagnostic tooling that sped development ~30%, and ran a UX pilot across five care organisations on time and on budget.
Built gamified data tooling that cut modelling time ~30% and resolved ~50k discrepancies for 30+ retailers. Delivered 50+ features in eight months and led four developers through bi-weekly sprints.
The product, the brand, and every layer in between: agent runtime and MCP architecture through backend, frontend, and the full visual identity, built from zero. highlight.ing
A self-hosted platform for running a fleet of Claude agents from one box: orchestrator, sandboxes, dashboard and CLI, reachable from anywhere over Tailscale with zero public ingress.
The Claude Code plugins and skills I use daily, made public as a one-install marketplace. github.com/vasudev-io/playbook
Product design, design engineering, product engineering, React, TypeScript, Next.js, design systems, AI agents, MCP, LLM evals, brand, and motion.