Design engineer, if you want the label the industry has landed on: I own the data model, the state, the hard subsystems, and the UI, and then I test it, submit it, and answer the support email. Six shipped iOS apps say so: two on the App Store, four private ones that businesses run on every day. I am looking for a small team that wants one person who covers that whole stretch.
Not mockups. Things people pay for and use every day, each one taken from a blank repo to production by me (the design, the architecture, the code, the release, and the part afterward where real users find what you missed).
TideStitch · iPhone, iPad, Mac →
A quilt design app on a real vector-polygon geometry engine, built solo and live on the App Store since July 2026. SwiftUI, SwiftData, CloudKit sync, Mac Catalyst, a paid tier, and an Android port in beta. The math is guarded by oracle test suites because the output is a cut list someone takes a rotary cutter to.
YEET Flips · iOS ↗
Resale profit tracking, free on the App Store. Smaller app, same pipeline: concept, data model, UI, submission, and the support email afterward.
ShopTracker · iPad, in production daily →
The six-stage work-order app a hydraulics shop runs on: shared shop-floor iPads with device-based roles instead of logins, an offline-first Supabase backend built for flaky Starlink, and QR asset tracking that generates its own print sheets.
This site, and the client portal behind it →
Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe webhooks, Vercel. Quotes, invoices, and care plans for web clients, plus the marketing surface you are reading. Same person designed the brand and wrote the SQL.
I came up through design (a graphic design degree, twenty years of Adobe, and a lot of print work that taught me what happens when the file is wrong and the press is already running). I moved into code because the mockup was never the part anyone could use, and I kept going until I could ship the whole thing myself. That order matters: I design the data model the way I design a layout, which is to say I care about what it feels like to live inside it six months from now.
I work AI-native and I am not shy about it. I spec the system, drive the tooling through implementation, and then I am the one who tests it, reads the diff, and owns what ships. TideStitch has a release preflight that builds both platforms in Release, diffs the CloudKit schema against production, and runs the geometry oracle suites, because the one time that gate did not exist, a shipped version silently dropped fields from sync for every user who had it. I learned that the way everyone does and then I wrote the gate so I never learn it again.
I am most effective in autonomous roles on small teams where owning the full pipeline is the point: founding engineer, design engineer, product engineer, the iOS person at a web company or the web person at an iOS company. I am less useful as one of forty people maintaining a slice of something, not because I cannot, but because you would be paying for range you are not using.
Apple platforms
Swift, SwiftUI, SwiftData, CloudKit, Mac Catalyst, PDFKit, App Store Connect end to end (TestFlight, review, IAP, Sales and Trends). Xcode build performance is a thing I actually pay attention to.
Web
Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase (Postgres, RLS, edge functions), Stripe, Vercel, Cloudflare. Astro when the site is mostly content.
Cross-platform
Shipped an Android port of a SwiftUI app with Skip, release builds through R8 and all, to a Play internal-test group. Enough to have opinions about where the sharp edges are.
Design and physical
Adobe Creative Suite, brand systems, print production, photography. Fusion 360 and Bambu 3D printers when the part does not exist yet. This is the part most engineering teams do not have and most design teams cannot ship.
Remote?
Yes, and set up for it: I have run my own practice remotely and shipped everything above from Punta Gorda, Florida (Eastern time). Occasional travel is fine. Relocation is a conversation, not a no.
Full-time or contract?
Either. I have an LLC and the paperwork to contract cleanly, and I would take the right full-time role. What I am not looking for is a pure design seat or a pure maintenance seat.
Why is the GitHub quiet?
Because the real work is in private repos that ship to paying users, and the client work belongs to the clients. The TideStitch case study has the technical half written for exactly this question, and I am happy to walk through the codebase on a call.
What should I send?
An email with what you are building and what is broken. I read every one and I answer them myself.