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Rowan Vale

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

Lisbon, Portugalrowan@example.comcv-to-portfolio-demo.vercel.app/boldrowan.examplegithub.example/rowanvalelinkedin.example/in/rowanvale

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

Senior Product Engineer, Northwind Labs

– Present

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.

Front-end Engineer, Contoso 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.

Web Developer, Fabrikam 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.

Junior Developer (internship), Tailspin Toys

–

Porto

Projects

Tidepool

tidepool.example

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

Contrast Cat

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

Fieldbook

Offline-first research app built at Northwind Labs.

Tiny Atlas

2020

A 9 kB vector map renderer for slow phones.

Education

MSc Human–Computer Interaction, University of Example Lisbon

–

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

BSc Computer Science, Example Polytechnic of Porto

–

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

Certifications

Languages

Portuguese (Native), English (Fluent), French (Conversational)