Drake Costa

Design Engineer & OSS Maintainer at Independent (2023-07 – Present)

Element Biosciences (via Liminal Labs): Partnered with lead designer to architect a scalable light/dark mode design token system across core foundations (color, typography, layout), tightening the feedback loop between design concept and React production environments.
Supabase (contract): Modernized core Studio app user flows with enhanced accessibility, visual coherence and keyboard navigation hardened by integration tests and type-safe API mocks.
OSS (independent): Practiced AI-accelerated development to build and maintain numerous libraries (see projects) focused on developer experience, performance and testing, as well as hand-crafted contributions to popular libraries such as Valibot.
Volunteering: Designed and built crimsonwitnesses.com, an Astro + Markdown event guide built for mobile use in low-data environments. Mentoring a small cohort through a self-authored Japanese course, producing weekly lessons in Figma Slides.

Senior Product Engineer at M1 Finance (2022-08 – 2023-05)

Partnered with designers on the design system committee to prototype and ship a color token theming solution using oklch() and CSS Custom Properties, complete with supporting documentation and migration patterns.
Hand-optimized over 450 SVG icons and illustrations to replace a legacy png + base64 encoding approach, significantly cutting library size from 36mb to 3.2mb (91% reduction) and resolving CI build failures.
Mentored colleagues in accessibility patterns such as WAI-ARIA attributes, keyboard interactions, tab focus management, and WCAG + APCA color contrast ratios via prototypes and live demos.
Leveraged fluency in Figma to bridge communication between designers and engineers; leading efforts to establish more effective handoff processes and bring technical clarity to stakeholders across disciplines.

Software Engineer II at Nike (2020-10 – 2021-07)

Hand-migrated a 200+ component design system and other internal libraries to Typescript to establish core type-safety foundations; drove wider Typescript adoption via hands-on training sessions and code reviews.
Engineered a unified JavaScript tooling CLI that abstracted away maintenance of tools (Babel, ESLint, Jest, Prettier, Typescript) while also weaving in best practices through shared configurations and zero-config defaults.
Established the type-safety foundations of Nike.com's next-generation platform in Next.js (its first major TypeScript codebase), hardening the shared global state and privacy-consent layers on which other product teams built.

Full Stack Engineer at CodeSandbox (2019-05 – 2020-03)

Hired on a three-month contract to build UI for the templating feature, delivered ahead of schedule, and was extended to nine months as a founding-stage engineer on a ~6-person, fully-remote team spread across Europe.
Designed a crash-recovery UI using React Error Boundaries that turned failures into a feedback loop, surfacing a clear recovery screen and auto-populating a pre-filled GitHub issue with browser, OS, version, and stack context, which produced 350+ structured reports over two years.
Prototyped UI work directly inside the product itself to exploit its instant refresh-on-save loop and demonstrated the workflow to the team, which helped catalyze dogfooding as a formal engineering practice.

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