Akshay Deshpande

Akshay Deshpande

Senior product designer for complex B2B software and design systems.

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Summary

Senior product designer who builds complex B2B SaaS products and design systems from the ground up. Before design, I spent eight years as a back-end, front-end and UX engineer.

  • Design leadership. Central design lead for F5's NGINX One, a cloud console for managing fleets of NGINX servers, from 0→1. Features I designed helped secure contracts worth $12.5M.
  • Designing for AI. Designed the NGINX One AI Assistant, and I use AI tools like Claude Code and Figma MCP throughout my own process.
  • Data-informed design. Used app analytics to redesign mobile apps, which lifted App Store downloads and ratings.
  • UX advocacy and mentorship. Founded a UX community at Tieto, won an employee award for running UX workshops, and mentor peers and juniors.

Design experience

F5, Inc. - Austin, TX

Jan 2023 – Oct 2025

Senior UX Designer

  • Led and delivered design for F5's NGINX One SaaS platform, a cloud console that helps customers manage their NGINX servers, from first concept through launch and beyond.
  • Designed dashboards, an AI assistant, infrastructure monitoring and configuration management tools that simplified complex workflows and helped secure contracts worth $12.5M.
  • Synthesized customer feedback and worked with PMs, engineers and designers on NGINX Management Suite, improving customer retention by 32%.
  • Made detailed high-fidelity mockups the source of truth for every UI workflow, which aligned stakeholders at every level and sped up releases.

Fungible Inc. - Reston, VA

Oct 2020 – Aug 2022

Product Designer and UX Engineer

  • Built the company's design system in Figma and coded its web components in Angular, HTML and Sass, cutting design-to-development cycles by about 40%.
  • Implemented design system foundations in code, including typography, color palettes and component variants.
  • Launched Fungible Data Center Composer from 0→1: the end-to-end SaaS experience for a virtualized bare-metal data center, delivering 4–5x AI workload performance over AWS and Google Cloud.
  • Designed resource allocation, monitoring and networking across 3 major releases, driving adoption by 10+ enterprise clients including Tesla and T-Mobile, and $1M ARR in year one.

Compose.Cloud (formerly Cloudistics) - Reston, VA

Jul 2018 – Oct 2020

Product Designer | UX Engineer | Front-end Engineer

  • Researched, designed and prototyped interfaces that simplified new functionality in a complex infrastructure management product.
  • Established the company's design system and prototyping components for front-end engineering teams.
  • Implemented front-end improvements to the core product.

DrFirst Inc. - Rockville, MD

May 2017 – Aug 2017

UX Intern

  • Designed two new features for a key client of Backline, a secure messaging app, through user research, personas, workflows, wireframes, clickable prototypes and user testing.

Engineering experience

Tieto, June Software (YC) and Intellista | 2010 – 2016 ShowHide

Tieto - Pune, India

Aug 2014 – Jul 2016

Software Engineer and UX Leader

  • Developed modules of a school administration platform widely used across Swedish municipalities, integrated with Sweden's national population registry, working in .NET MVC and JavaScript.
  • Founded and ran a UX community inside Tieto, and introduced a user-centered design approach among engineers.

June Software (Y Combinator)

2012 – 2014

API and Mobile Engineer

  • Rebuilt the API behind 40 apps, handling about 1M requests an hour at peak working in .NET MVC, Node.js, and MongoDB.
  • Built all of the company's Windows Phone apps, with 300K+ downloads.

Intellista

2010 – 2011

Web Developer

  • Built websites and web applications for clients in PHP, .NET MVC and JavaScript.

Skills & tools

Design

  • Design systems
  • User research
  • Contextual inquiry
  • Prototyping
  • Usability testing
  • Wireframing
  • Accessibility (WCAG)
  • User flows
  • Journey mapping
  • Data-informed design
  • Survey design

Tools

  • Figma
  • Figma MCP
  • Figma Make
  • Claude Code
  • Claude Design
  • FigJam
  • Miro
  • Lucidchart
  • Sketch

Engineering

  • HTML
  • CSS / Sass
  • JavaScript
  • Angular
  • AngularJS
  • Node.js
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • MongoDB

Education

University of Maryland - College Park, MD

2016 - 2018

M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction

  • GPA 3.97 / 4.0.
  • Capstone project won the student project competition and was presented at the UXPA International Conference.

University of Pune - Pune, India

Bachelor of Computer Engineering