VP Product Design @ EDB · Pleasant Grove, Utah

I build at the
intersection of
Code & Creative.

$ I turn designs into shipped products.

I'm Jace — a design-and-engineering hybrid who leads remote teams and ships AI-forward products. VP of Product Design at EDB, former Sr. Director of Engineering. I speak both languages fluently.

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15+
Years, design + eng
IC → VP
Maker and leader
8
Shipped this year
1 → 100+
Teams, small to large

01 / Selected work

8 products,
and counting.

Legal AI, brand intelligence, telehealth, a social app, a family adventure hub, and more — designed and shipped over the past year. Real products, real users, real deadlines.

1Up — Achieve greatness together-ish
Mobile · Social · 2026

1Up

Do hard things together — but make it fun.

A social accountability app for chasing ambitious goals with your crew. Start a time-bound challenge — a marathon, a month of daily workouts, a mountain to climb — drag your friends in, and check in daily on a shared leaderboard. It reframes accountability as a game: earn merit badges, hand out de-merits, and keep each other honest with a potent mix of encouragement and light emotional damage.

Solo full-stack build — native iOS/Android via Capacitor, a Firebase backend with scheduled push reminders, and AI-generated challenge titles and cover art through Gemini + Imagen.

  • Time-bound group challenges with deep-link friend invites
  • Daily check-ins + a live per-challenge leaderboard
  • Badge economy: earn, gift, and spend in the gloat shop
  • Scheduled push reminders via Cloud Functions + FCM
  • AI-generated challenge titles and cover art (Gemini / Imagen)
  • Ionic Vue 3
  • Capacitor
  • Firebase
  • Cloud Functions
  • Tailwind
  • Gemini

Founder + lead engineer — design, mobile, backend, and the whole badge economy.

1up.me
TNW Legal AI — matter dashboard
Legal AI · 2026

TNW Legal AI

Multi-pass AI drafting for a real patent law firm.

A production desktop platform built for Thorpe North & Western LLP that drafts patent applications, office-action responses, trademark filings, and litigation documents using multi-pass Claude pipelines with attorney review gates. AI drafting, matter management, and Word export in a single installable app — with role-based access and per-matter AI cost tracking.

The patent-drafting pipeline runs 10 sequential Claude passes across 4 attorney gates, with a deterministic-plus-LLM spec verifier and an automated repair loop — statute-aware prompting turned into an auditable, cost-controlled drafting workflow.

  • 10-pass, 4-gate patent drafting with verifier → repair loop
  • SSE token streaming tied to AbortController — close a tab, halt spend
  • MPEP/TMEP statute injection + agentic competitor-intel search
  • Gemini 37-CFR-compliant patent figure generation
  • Direct OOXML Word export with amendment markup
  • Electron 35
  • React 19
  • Express 5
  • Prisma
  • Claude SDK
  • Gemini

Co-developer — the multi-pass AI pipeline, Electron/Express monorepo, and OOXML Word engine.

DocReview — three-pane document review
Legal AI · Privacy · 2026

DocReview

Attorney document review that never leaves your machine.

A local desktop app for litigation attorneys to ingest, search, and review discovery material — emails, documents, images — while keeping every client file on-device. AI finds responsive documents, flags privilege, and drafts discovery responses, then exports production-ready reports. Built for privacy-sensitive firms that legally can't send client data to the cloud.

Offline-first privacy architecture: the entire AI stack runs locally with an Ollama fallback and per-session token auth. Its discovery engine is a cost-aware RAG design — cheap Haiku triage feeds a deeper Sonnet pass with sub-query decomposition and confidence scoring.

  • Ingests PDF, Office, emails (.pst/.mbox/.msg), images w/ OCR
  • Hybrid search: FTS5 + semantic, fused via reciprocal-rank
  • Two-pass Haiku → Sonnet discovery with gap analysis
  • Automated privilege screens + three-pane review UI
  • Airplane Mode — fully offline AI via Ollama
  • Electron
  • React
  • FastAPI
  • SQLite / FTS5
  • sentence-transformers
  • Claude
  • Ollama

Co-developer — Electron/React front end, FastAPI backend, AI pipeline, and release automation.

Brand OS dashboard — Brand Pulse and Brand Health
AI · Brand · 2026

Brand OS

An AI knowledge base and brand-strategy engine.

A multi-tenant cloud app that ingests files, text, and URLs into an AI-embedded knowledge base, then runs semantic search and Gemini-powered analysis on top of it. Organizations get isolated data with role-based access; admins generate and execute brand plans grounded in real customer insight — plus a conversational Brand Lab and competitive-analysis tooling.

Real multi-tenant security engineering — a batch embedding pipeline with retry logic in Cloud Functions, backed by ~20KB of hardened, emulator-tested Firestore rules. Not a toy.

  • Multi-source ingestion (files, text, URLs) into a chunked KB
  • Semantic search over Gemini embeddings
  • Gemini Pro insight, trend, and brand-plan generation
  • Org-based multi-tenancy with role-based access
  • Emulator-tested Firestore security-rules suite
  • Vue 3
  • PrimeVue
  • Firebase
  • Cloud Functions
  • Gemini
  • Netlify

Sole developer + architect — Vue front end, Firebase backend, and the whole embeddings pipeline.

brand-os.netlify.app
ClientFinder — patent-prosecution prospect search (data redacted)
Data Intelligence · 2026

ClientFinder

Turns public USPTO data into patent-prosecution leads.

A business-development intelligence dashboard that mines public USPTO patent data to identify companies that are prospects for patent-prosecution legal services. It disambiguates messy assignee data, models each company's patent spend, and surfaces ranked prospects with watchlist and exclusion workflows for firm BD teams.

The ETL + assignee-disambiguation + spend-model pipeline fuses several messy public datasets (PatentsView, PEDS, EDGAR) into a scored, deduplicated prospect ranking — with security-conscious, App-Check-gated deployment.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • Streamlit
  • React
  • Firebase

Co-developer — ETL pipeline, FastAPI API, spend model, and both the Streamlit and React dashboards.

Pleasant Grove Arts Commission — Create. Inspire. Connect.
CMS · Creative · 2026

PG Arts Commission

A CMS-driven home for a city's arts community.

A public website for the Pleasant Grove Arts Commission, split into a Sanity CMS studio for content and a Vue 3 front end that renders programs, events, and dynamic pages. Non-technical staff manage everything — with drag-to-order — in Sanity, and the site pulls it live. Both halves deploy independently to Netlify.

A clean headless split with a custom orderable studio desk and production-grade Netlify config — SPA redirects, security headers, immutable asset caching, and an automated schema deploy in the build.

  • Vue 3
  • Sanity CMS
  • PrimeVue
  • Tailwind
  • Netlify

Full-stack — Sanity schema and studio structure, the Vue front end, and both deployments.

pgarts.org
Harmer Adventures — upcoming trips schedule
AI · Adventure · 2026

Harmer Adventures

Year-round family adventures, planned with AI.

A private, invite-only site for planning and journaling my family's year-round outdoor adventures. Members browse an at-a-glance trip schedule with kid-friendliness ratings, drill into logistics and packing lists, and RSVP — while a public 'field notes' blog shows off past trips. Admins get an in-browser CMS with Claude-powered assistance for scaffolding new trips and polishing write-ups.

Safety-aware AI design: Claude scaffolds trips into structured, schema-matching frontmatter with a verify-before-publish human gate for anything safety-critical — and the Git repo itself is the CMS, committing markdown through Netlify to trigger rebuilds. No database for content.

  • Astro 6
  • Tailwind
  • Claude
  • Netlify Functions
  • Netlify Blobs
  • TypeScript

Solo build — design, Astro front end, the AI planning pipeline, and the git-based CMS.

QuickNote MD — Skip the waiting room
Telehealth · SaaS · 2026

QuickNote MD

Skip the waiting room — a doctor's note in 24 hours.

A telehealth platform that delivers legitimate, physician-signed doctor's notes for work or school without a clinic visit. Patients complete a ~3-minute form, pay once, and a board-certified physician personally reviews the request and emails a signed PDF within 24 hours — each note carrying a QR code employers and schools can use to verify authenticity.

A verifiable-document pipeline — generated PDF notes carry a QR code linking to a public verification page backed by an access log — plus a clean Stripe paid-gate where payment state controls physician approval end to end.

  • Laravel 11
  • Vue 3
  • Inertia
  • Tailwind
  • Stripe
  • Horizon

Co-developer — built the physician dashboard, admin stats, and the automated email-reminder lifecycle.

quicknotemd.app

02 / About

Two sides of
the same coin.

I've always been drawn to the seam between Design and Engineering — to me they were never separate worlds, just two sides of the same coin.

  • Product Design
  • Design Systems
  • Engineering Leadership
  • Remote Team Building
  • AI Product Strategy
  • Front-End Craft
  • UX
  • Full-Stack

My career has lived on both sides of that seam: from pixel-perfect product design to leading full-stack engineering organizations. I don't just bridge the gap — I speak both languages fluently, which lets me build workflows where designers and engineers aren't fighting for control, they're building together.

I've spent over a decade leading remote teams — from a two-person skunkworks to large, global orgs — and I've sat on both sides of the org chart, as the IC and as the executive. I'm as comfortable in the weeds shipping code as I am setting direction, and I know the two jobs need each other. Whatever the team size, what I care about most is keeping people supported, connected, and accountable.

I'm practical about new tech. I don't chase trends — I introduce AI tooling specifically to remove the boring, repetitive parts of the job so my teams can focus on the creative problem-solving they were actually hired to do.

03 / The path

Design → Engineering → Both.

A career that kept crossing the line between disciplines — until the line stopped mattering.

  1. VP, Product Design · EDB

    2024 — Present

    Leading product design org; drove the company's shift toward AI-driven product functionality.

  2. Sr. Director of Software Engineering · Crux

    2022 — 2024

    Led a full-stack org building a data-logistics SaaS at a Series B startup.

  3. Sr. Director of Software Development · Moody's Analytics

    2021 — 2022

    Via acquisition of RMS.

  4. Director → Sr. Director of Software Development · RMS

    2015 — 2021

    Built and scaled a global, remote engineering org across five persona-driven apps.

  5. Director of UX · Kapost

    2014 — 2015

    Led experience design in a collaborative startup environment.

  6. Designer / Developer · Freelance / SPK Media

    2009 — 2017

    Branding, identity, and custom WordPress development.

04 / Contact

Let's build something
worth shipping.

Got a product idea, a team to level up, or just want to talk about where design and engineering meet? I'd love to hear it.

jaceharmer@gmail.com