Esteban
Palacio
I build design systems and the interfaces that sit on top of them. Eight years of it — most recently leading component and token work on the Abyss Design System at United Health Group.
- Led component API and token architecture on a micro-frontend platform, engineering 21 shared components and owning versioned releases with a 12-person cross-functional team.
- Resolved 80+ WCAG issues to reach 93% compliance; lifted Lighthouse performance 56 → 85 and best practices 54 → 78.
- Built Abyss Playground, a custom internal environment for live component experimentation, adopted by roughly 40% of teams, and introduced Figma Tokens for white-label theming.
- Co-designed the team's coding standards, PR conventions and review process.
- Built a five-step QuickOrder wizard in React and Zustand for ~80 sales reps, including an anonymous-cart path for orders placed before a customer is linked.
- Diagnosed 40+ cross-stack bugs across the React frontend and GraphQL BFF — duplicate pay-by-link charges, timezone and service-charge errors — closing 50+ tickets and reconciling $10,000+ in erroneous charges.
- Implemented SAML single sign-on with an OIDC fallback, and restored BFF branch coverage above 80%.
- Modernised the Mayo Clinic portal: user flows, Redux state management and SSR/CSR tradeoffs, as part of a 20-person team.
- Shipped a React Native recovery-tracking app used by 100+ patients, built under strict privacy and data-localization constraints.
- Built survey flows, card interfaces, routing architecture and Chart.js dashboards for Genoa Clinic.
A keyboard-first Japanese kana practice app: adaptive review, a 208-entry kana curriculum, and a fully offline-installable PWA with a custom service worker for atomic build updates.
I came to engineering sideways. Before this I spent four years in finance in Sydney — a broker and lending manager running a A$100M loan book, building cashflow models, explaining structures to people making the largest decision of their lives. That job taught me more about interface design than any course did: if someone can't understand the number in front of them, nothing else you built matters.
Now I do the same thing in code. Most of my work lives one layer below the product — shared components, tokens, accessibility, the CI that catches things before a human has to. It's quiet work, and I like that other teams move faster because of it.
I taught for a year at Le Wagon. Outside work: four languages spoken, three more in progress, and a long-running habit of over-reading the changelog.
Master of Commerce (E-Commerce)
University of Wollongong
Diploma, Finance & Mortgage Broking Management, AAMC Training Group
Le Wagon Tokyo, full-stack
French — conversational
Italian, Mandarin, Japanese — learning
Let's talk.
Open to senior frontend roles at product companies. I read everything, and I reply.