Rowan Vale
CV

Rowan Vale

Senior Product Engineer · Design systems, web performance, offline-first apps

Lisbon, Portugal

About

Product engineer with 9 years of experience turning fuzzy ideas into fast, accessible interfaces. I lead design-system work, care a lot about the first 100 milliseconds, and like small teams that ship weekly. Currently building offline-first tools for field researchers at Northwind Labs.

Outside work I maintain two open-source libraries and mentor at a local coding school.

Experience

  1. – Present

    Senior Product EngineerNorthwind Labs

    Lisbon (hybrid)

    • Lead the front end of Fieldbook, an offline-first data-collection app used by 4,000 researchers in 30 countries.
    • Cut median page load from 3.8 s to 1.1 s by moving to streaming server rendering and an image CDN.
    • Started and run the design system (60 components, documented in Storybook) used by 5 product teams.
  2. –

    Front-end EngineerContoso Health

    Remote

    • Rebuilt the patient booking flow; completed bookings rose 23% and support tickets fell by a third.
    • Brought the web app to WCAG 2.1 AA and added automated accessibility checks to CI.
  3. –

    Web DeveloperFabrikam Studio

    Porto

    • Built 40+ marketing sites and e-commerce stores for clients in retail and tourism.
    • Introduced component-based CSS and visual regression tests to the agency.
  4. –

    Junior Developer (internship)Tailspin Toys

    Porto

Projects

  • Tidepool

    Open-source CRDT sync engine for offline-first web apps.

    • CRDT
    • offline-first
    TypeScript 2.1K

  • Contrast Cat

    Browser extension that flags low-contrast text while you design.

    • accessibility
    JavaScript 640

  • Fieldbook

    Offline-first research app built at Northwind Labs.

  • Tiny Atlas

    2020

    A 9 kB vector map renderer for slow phones.

    • WebAssembly
    Rust

Skills

Programming languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Rust
  • SQL

Front end

  • React
  • Svelte
  • Web Components
  • CSS architecture
  • Accessibility (WCAG)
  • Web performance

Tooling

  • Vite
  • Playwright
  • Storybook
  • GitHub Actions
  • Figma

Education

  1. –

    MSc Human–Computer InteractionUniversity of Example Lisbon

    Thesis: “Perceived speed in progressive web apps”. Graduated with distinction.

  2. –

    BSc Computer ScienceExample Polytechnic of Porto

Certifications

  • Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) IAAP · 2021

Languages

  • Portuguese Native
  • English Fluent
  • French Conversational

Contact

Get in touch

Email
rowan@example.com
Location
Lisbon, Portugal