I'm Vinoth Kumar Manickam, a Lead UX Designer on the principal-track IC path with 8+ years shipping enterprise software, fintech platforms, and AI/ML product interfaces. Available for full-time, fractional, and scoped consulting engagements.
I'm open to lead and principal UX designer roles — staying on the principal-track IC path — at companies building enterprise software, fintech platforms, or AI/ML products. Remote-first across US time zones.
8–20 hours per week as the lead UX voice in your product org — design strategy, hiring support, mentoring your team, and shipping alongside them. Ideal for Series A–C startups before a full-time hire.
Short, outcome-driven projects with a clear deliverable: AI surface design, design system stand-up, UX audit of a critical flow, or end-to-end design for a single product area.
1:1 coaching for mid-level designers moving into Senior, Staff, and Lead UX roles. Portfolio teardown, interview prep, narrative coaching, and IC career planning.
Multi-stakeholder workflows, role-based access, governance and audit surfaces — turned into tools people actually want to open. MUSE platform at Fannie Mae, fleet management at Esper, Jira/Confluence at Atlassian.
Payments, investing, retirement, and developer-facing fintech APIs. Vanguard retirement & advice platform serving 2M+ investors; PayPal Developer Portal with AI-powered authorization tooling.
Conversational AI in 6 languages, model-governance UX, confidence and lineage displays, human-in-the-loop review patterns. The Systemic Design Method is my framework for designing AI inside regulated organizations.
I take on senior and lead UX engagements in enterprise software, fintech, and AI/ML products — full-time roles, fractional design leadership, and short scoped consulting engagements (audits, design system bootstrapping, AI surface design). I'm based in Austin, TX and work remote across US time zones.
Yes. I take on a small number of contract and fractional UX engagements per year, typically 8–20 hours per week alongside a primary role. Common engagements: design audits, AI surface design, design system stand-up, hiring manager support, and senior portfolio reviews.
A senior UX designer portfolio leads with strategy, not screens. It shows how you frame ambiguous problems, lead cross-functional partners, navigate stakeholders, and ship measurable outcomes inside real product constraints. Visual craft matters, but the story is about judgment — why this trade-off, why this scope, why this metric.
A principal UX designer portfolio shows org-level impact: design systems adopted across products, frameworks others reuse, programs that change how the company ships. Mine includes the Systemic Design Method — a framework for designing AI inside regulated organizations — alongside case studies where I led design across multiple product surfaces.
Tell me about the team, the product, and the problem. I'll reply within a business day with whether it's a fit and what working together as your lead UX partner could look like.
vinothm856@gmail.com