Radu Vucea ⭐️

Leading AR/VR Design @ Reality Labs

Mento Design Academy

Our mission is to help young professionals and career-switchers transition faster and smoother to a career in UX, UI, or Product Design by teaching the right skills, the right way.

Founder

MYBENEFITS

Advisor & Investor

FlairMakers

ixperi

Building a Digital Product Design Studio has been a dream of mine for a long time.

In early 2021, I finally decided to give it a go, and I co-founded ixperi with the mission of creating an elite design team that could deliver exceptional quality and impact.

In just three years, completely bootstrapped, my team and I:

→ Grew the studio to 13 stellar Product Designers and Product Managers
→ Built a fantastic culture of learning, development, and excellence through mentorship and coaching
→ Went from $0 to $1M in yearly revenue
→ Designed and delivered for high growth start-ups like Fresha, FlowX and Jellysmack

Co-Founder, Exit in 2023

Actio

Chief Design Officer

VP, Product Design

Fitbit (now part of Google)

In my role of Product Design Manager at Fitbit, I was initially in charge of building from the ground up and leading the whole design team in Bucharest.

In my three years in this role I have:

→ Built the Product Design team in Bucharest, 15 strong, influencing the headcount strategy to bring in key roles such as UX Research and Design Ops.
→ Created an amazing design culture, recognized company-wide, based on transparency, authenticity, trust, and support, which enabled shipping successful products while maintaining a near-zero attrition rate.
→ Established processes and opportunities that enabled team growth, such as reviews, critiques, and knowledge sharing sessions and events such as Learning Friday and Friday Speaker Series.
→ Influenced the company roadmap and strategy to ship the first line of Fitbit products for kids.
→ Shipped several products that had a revenue and company strategy impact, such as Active Zone Minutes and Fitbit Premium, the latter bringing in over 1,000,000 subscribers in under one year.

Product Design Manager

While in my role as a Senior Product Designer at Fitbit I owned the development of the Fitbit App Gallery from the ground up.

Initially meant to support our first smartwatch, the Ionic, with custom content that users could download, it now supports almost a dozen Fitbit smart devices, counts over 12,000 apps, and watch faces, all of which have been downloaded over 245 Million times.

The Fitbit App Gallery also attracted a thriving community of over 1,000 developers, many of them creating a steady stream of income through creating content for Fitbit.

Senior Product Designer

Vector Watch

While in my role at Vector Watch I wore many hats, as any does in a startup.

From redesigning the company's website with a goal to increase sales — to creating marketing assets in partnership with our marketing department to create awareness, no day was the same.

My most significant achievement, however, has been creating the Vector Developer Portal from the ground up, an easy-to-use web-based tool anyone could use to create a custom watch face or app for their Vector Watch.

It was exceptionally received, gathering over 1800 content creators and over 3000 watch faces and apps in just a few months.

Vector Watch was acquired in 2017 by Fitbit, and I went to be a Product Designer and Design Manager for them.

Product Designer

Adobe

In my time at Adobe, I moved from a Graphic Designer role in the marketing department to a Visual Designer role for the same product and, ultimately, for the last two years, to a Product Designer role as part of the innovation team tasked with validating next-generation products for Adobe.

Through a Lean Startup methodology we were validating product ideas and opportunities, at a fast pace, employing user interviews, prototyping and usability testing, working within a cross-functional team of developers, product managers and designers.

The most notable achievement is validating the MVP for what would become Adobe Stock and the Libraries feature inside Photoshop, Illustrator and other five Adobe CC products.

Various

Freelance Digital Designer

I am a Senior Design Executive, Investor, and Advisor who began his career back in 2005. Since then, I had the opportunity to work for startups, design studios, and big brands alike, having built products and design teams from scratch for companies like Adobe and Fitbit.

More recently, I served as Chief Design Officer for Berlin-based start-up Actio. With a drive for entrepreneurship, I founded my own Product Design Studio back in 2020 and grew that to a 7 figure yearly revenue in less than two years, exiting in late 2023. I now serve as an advisor and investor for several tech start-ups across the world.

My happy place is helping other designers grow and create stellar work. Having hired and mentored hundreds of designers to date, I'm currently focused on scaling up my Design Academy, founded three years ago.

Feel free to contact me for the following:
* Public speaking opportunities (panels, podcasts, events, corporate training)
* Advisory roles on Product Design
* Opportunities on the level of Co-Founder or Senior Design Leadership

Make sure to check my recommendations on my profile here if you'd like to know what it's like to work with me.

Mindera

Software Engineer

Cambia Health Solutions

• Designed, developed and maintained secured, fault-tolerant and scalable N-layer applications, separating heavy data processing from responsive front end;
• Researched, developed and deployed container based Restful/GraphQL services on AWS ECS & serverless real-time data pipeline on AWS Cloud Solutions;
• Designed and developed the Benefits Accumulator Service - graphQL service responsible for providing health insurance plan benefits and accumulators data to members accessing the Regence Portal.
The service uses express/apollo server, consumes data from facets restful services exposed from Apigee and transforms and returns the data according to the portal requirements;
• Implemented data pipeline that generates data analytics for the Journi Analitycs Dashboard. The pipeline consumes events from different systems and transforms the data according to business requirements on AWS Platform using NodeJS/Java, AWS Lambda, AWS step functions, AWS S3, AWS SQS, PostgreSQL, CircleCI, Docker.

Software Engineer III

Equinix

• Designed and developed the Equinix Cloud Exchange - an innovative API based cloud interconnectivity and colocation product;
• A major contributor in designing and developing Cloud Reach, a solution to discover and connect across metros to any available cloud provider;
• A major contributor in designing and refactoring microservices to obtain better performance and availability;
• Refactored and optimized APIs to perform 3x faster.

Staff Software Engineer

• Designed and developed the Equinix Cloud Exchange - an innovative API based cloud interconnectivity and colocation product;
• Designed and developed microservices using AquaJs (a NodeJS framework developed in-house); 
• Designed and developed REST APIs.

Software Engineering Consultant

• Designed and performed end-to-end functional and regression testing for PFM (Personal Finance Manager) - financial assistant integrated with Internet banking.

Quality Assurance Engineer

Volksbank Romania

• Designed and developed software applications related to the reporting request by the Financial Controlling Division and Risk Division;
• Designed and developed scripts and procedures for mandatory monthly reporting requests from the National Bank of Romania;
• Optimized development and running time for bank reports by creating a unique data source from multiple internal and external systems.

Staff Software Engineer 

• Designed and developed SSIS packages, stored procedures, tables, views, indexes, and functions;
• Designed and implemented ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) processes;
•  Optimized queries to increase the performance of the reports.

GO Business Solutions SRL

• Developed applications for the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development that managed the life-cycle of a request to access European Union funds, from data capture to authorization and payment;
• Designed the workflows for an application for the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests that automated the collection, processing, and reporting of environmental data to the European Union.

Hands-on contributor crafting applications and systems to support business needs and expand organizational capabilities for 10+ years.

Technical skills: NodeJs, Express, JavaScript, TypeScript, AngularJS, Agile Methodologies, Amazon Web Services (AWS),  AWS Lambda, AWS step function, AWS S3, GraphQL, Apollo Server, Apigee, Docker, localstack, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle PL/SQL, Java, API Design & Strategy, RESTful, REST APIs, Micro-Service, Jenkins, CircleCI, Git.

taplio

The Battle

Radu Vucea ⭐️

Mariana Ivascu

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