Austin Lord

Summary

Staff-level frontend and design systems engineer with 16+ years of experience building polished, durable software for complex organizations. I specialize in reusable component systems, accessible interfaces, thoughtful CSS, and product experiences that make complicated workflows easier to understand and use.

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Experience

Senior Software Engineer III · Meta (via Route 36) · Remote

Jan 2023 – Present

• Build React and TypeScript interfaces for complex operational workflows across network investments, planning, legal, and finance, helping hundreds of employees manage and visualize Meta’s global network infrastructure.
• Design and implement interfaces for complex operational workflows, translating dense infrastructure, inventory, and contract data into usable tools for cross-functional teams.
• Reduced page load times by 60% on high-traffic table views by re-architecting query patterns and optimizing backend hooks, directly improving usability for teams working with large, complex datasets.
• Build and maintain contract management tooling for network agreements valued at $100M+, contributing significant feature work, usability improvements, and reliability fixes to inherited systems.
• Own on-call responsibilities across data pipelines, infrastructure services, and application layers, triaging production issues and shipping fixes in coordination with internal stakeholders.

Senior Software Engineer · Rume Health · Remote

May 2022 – Dec 2022

• Joined during peak pandemic-era telehealth demand to help modernize a distributed healthcare platform serving patients, providers, and operations teams.
• Consolidated dozens of standalone AWS Lambda functions into a unified Python Chalice service backed by PostgreSQL, improving maintainability across EMR, Twilio, and internal workflow integrations.

Director of Digital Campus · Indiana University · Bloomington, IN

Jul 2019 – May 2022

• Directed the design and development of Rivet v2, Indiana University’s open-source design system (rivet.iu.edu), expanding support across websites, applications, and email templates while improving consistency, accessibility, and developer experience across the institution.
• Led engineers working across frontend platforms, design systems, core university websites, and mobile experiences, mentoring the team while driving adoption of shared standards and reusable component patterns.
• Architected and launched covid.iu.edu within days of the pandemic’s onset, creating the university’s central information platform for 90,000+ students, faculty, and staff across nine campuses.
• Built custom dashboard interfaces for daily case counts and isolation housing capacity, then sustained rapid, near-daily iteration for over a year as pandemic policy evolved.
• Coordinated across university leadership, public health officials, designers, content strategists, and engineering staff to keep critical information accurate, accessible, and usable under pressure.

Lead User Experience Engineer · Indiana University · Bloomington, IN

Nov 2016 – Jul 2019

• Created Rivet, one of the first open-source design systems in higher education (GitHub · npm), a component library adopted by dozens of teams and deployed across hundreds of websites and applications.
• Designed and implemented reusable UI components, documentation, layout patterns, and frontend standards that helped distributed teams ship consistent, accessible product experiences.
• Led a team of User Experience Engineers building shared tooling, institutional interfaces, and security-focused platforms, establishing patterns for collaboration between designers, engineers, and product stakeholders.
• Grew Rivet’s visibility through features at multiple higher education technology conferences, contributing to broader adoption of design system practices in institutional settings.

Senior Web Developer · Indiana University · Remote

Oct 2011 – Nov 2016

• Founded the development team within the Office of the Vice President for IT, growing it from a solo role into a four-engineer group that eventually became the university’s UX engineering office.
• Delivered Indiana University’s first responsive, search-driven platforms for IT service delivery, establishing early frontend patterns for large-scale institutional web applications.

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Skills

Design Engineering: Design systems, component libraries, UI implementation, responsive design, accessibility, interaction polish, developer experience, Figma-to-code collaboration

Frontend: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS/SASS, Tailwind, Next.js, Angular, Vue

Product & Platform: Frontend architecture, reusable patterns, internal tools, complex workflows, data-heavy interfaces, legacy modernization

Backend & Systems: Node.js, Python, PHP, Hack, Rust, Laravel, AWS Lambda, Chalice, PostgreSQL, SQL, GraphQL, API design, data pipelines, production reliability

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Education

Master of Science, Motion Graphics Design · Indiana University · Bloomington, IN · 2010

Bachelor of Arts, Media Production · Indiana University · Bloomington, IN · 2007