Mai Soriano
Design engineer, Rotterdam
Booking November
Interfaces designed and built by the same pair of hands.
I’m Mai, a design engineer. I take products from the first sketch to the shipped front end, so nothing gets lost between the design file and the pull request.
Rotterdam, NL
Experience
Currently
Shipped
Teams I’ve shipped with
halfday
Ledgerline
KESTREL
murmur
Paper Kite
Oda & Sons
tessera/ui
Verde
Selected work
Murmur
2024
Voice notes for field researchers, transcribed and tagged on the device so nothing leaves the room.
iOS
SwiftUI
Research
Ledgerline
2024
Invoicing for freelancers in four taps, with a dashboard that answers one question: have I been paid?
Web app
TypeScript
Data viz
Tessera UI
2023
An open-source React library of 48 accessible parts, themed with plain CSS variables.
Open source
React
Accessibility
Pollen
2022
Home-screen widgets that turn pollen and air data into one plain sentence about your day.
iOS widgets
SwiftUI
Motion
About
I trained as a graphic designer, learned to code so my prototypes would stop lying, and never went back to handing things over.
Most product problems hide in the gap between a design file and a browser. I work in that gap. I sketch in Figma for an afternoon, then move into code, where spacing, loading states and motion become real decisions instead of annotations.
Teams bring me in when they need one person to own an interface from first flow to merged pull request. Away from the screen I restore old bicycles and get beaten at chess by my nine-year-old niece.
Based in
Rotterdam, NL
Works in
English, Dutch, Tagalog
Usual hours
09:00 to 17:30 CET
The desk, around four
Prototype in the real medium
A coded prototype answers in a day what a static mock-up argues about for a week.
Fewer handoffs, fewer surprises
When the person who drew it also builds it, the details survive the trip to production.
Ship, then listen
I would rather release something small on Friday and learn from it on Monday.
Experience
2023 – Now
Design engineer
Now
Halfday
·
Rotterdam, hybrid
I lead the interface end to end: flows, the design system and the React front end. Time from design sign-off to release went from three weeks to four days.
2020 – 2023
Senior product designer
Ledgerline
·
Amsterdam
First design hire. I built the invoicing flow and the component library the product still runs on, then hired and coached two designers.
2018 – 2020
Product designer
Studio Kestrel
·
Utrecht
Agency work for twelve clients across fintech, health and retail. I introduced coded prototypes into every pitch.
2017 – 2018
Graphic designer
Paper Kite
·
Utrecht
Identity and editorial work for cultural clients. I taught myself JavaScript on the train home.
Education
Accessibility specialist
Self-study, certified
2021
Front-end engineering
Evening programme, Utrecht
2018
BA Interaction design
Maas Academy of Art, Rotterdam
2013 – 2017
Recognition
Best developer tool, Tessera UI
Lowlands Design Awards
2024
Speaker, Prototypes that don’t lie
Halfway Conf, Antwerp
2023
Honourable mention, Pollen
Northern Interface Awards
2022
Services
Product design
Flows, interface and a design system your engineers will actually adopt.
Research and flows
Interface and motion
Design system
Front-end build
Production React or SwiftUI, typed, tested and reviewed like the rest of your codebase.
React and TypeScript
SwiftUI
Accessibility pass
Prototype sprint
Two weeks from a rough idea to a coded prototype you can put in front of customers.
Fixed two weeks
Real data, real devices
From €6,400
Daily tools
Figma
Framer
React
TypeScript
SwiftUI
Tailwind CSS
Storybook
Playwright
Rive
Linear
Kind words
Mai is the only person I’ve worked with who can argue about a spring curve and a database index in the same meeting, and be right about both.
Ruben Kessler
CTO, Halfday
We stopped doing handoffs when she joined. The prototype simply became the product, and we shipped a quarter early.
Anouk Sterk
Founder, Ledgerline
Her components were documented so well that our interns shipped a change in their first week.
Jonas De Wit
Engineering lead, Studio Kestrel
I usually reply within a day
Booking November
Have a product that needs both halves of the brain?
I take on two projects a quarter. The next opening is in November, and the first call is always free.