Andru Dunn

Head of Design Engineering

About Me

I lead teams responsible for visual language, system foundations, and custom tooling — shaping frameworks that balance user delight with strategic business outcomes.

I specialize in brand systems, component-driven architecture,
and UI generation at scale. I work as a peer to product and platform orgs to bridge the gap between infrastructure stability and user-facing exceptionalism.

I have repeatedly led the technical execution of major brand transformations, specializing in anchoring sweeping visual changes within robust, reusable architectures.

Blending a deep respect for design principles with a structural engineering mindset, I set the patterns behind core concerns: design systems, accessibility, performance, experimentation, localization, and observability. I craft experiences that are fundamentally inclusive, scalable, and resilient.

I care most about the details — an optimistic update, an interruptible spring, a layered shadow ramp — they separate
the functional from the intentional.

I'm Head of Design Engineering at Personio, on the design leadership team in a 40+ person org. I own Design Infrastructure: the visual language, the design system and the tooling the whole org builds with, and I set the standards and direction that keep our product consistent and accessible as we scale.

I lead as a player-coach — directing a team of design engineers while still shipping — and I serve a 200+ cross-functional Design & Engineering community. I partner with product and stakeholders to shape programs of work across teams, balancing customer needs with business outcomes.

My background is design foremost, and I'm just as comfortable writing software as designing. Bridging the two has been the throughline of a career spent with retailers and products around the world.

I'm a design engineer — design foremost, and just as comfortable writing software as designing. Over thirteen years I've set the patterns behind most frontend concerns: design systems, accessibility, performance, interaction and motion, headless content, localization, instrumentation and resilience.

I've spent that career with retailers and products around the world — John Lewis, Waitrose, Woolworths, ASOS and now Personio — shipping inclusive, scalable, resilient experiences where design and engineering meet.

Today I'm Head of Design Engineering at Personio, on the design leadership team — leading Design Infrastructure and our shift to an AI-native way of designing and building.

My focus right now is AI. As Head of Design Engineering at Personio I'm making the way we design and build AI-native — building our Claude infrastructure (a marketplace, skills, MCPs and cloud agents) and reshaping how we prototype, generate and review UI, with the standards and guardrails that keep the product consistent and accessible as we ship faster.

I lead Design Infrastructure on the design leadership team in a 40+ person org, and serve a 200+ cross-functional design-system community.

My background is design foremost, and I'm just as comfortable writing software as designing — my career has been spent where the two disciplines meet, with retailers and products around the world.

I'm Head of Design Engineering at Personio, on the design leadership team of a 40+ person design org. I lead Design Infrastructure — our visual language, the design system and our AI tooling — and serve a 200+ cross-functional design-system community.

I work in the space where design and engineering meet: design foremost, and just as comfortable writing software as designing. Bridging the two has been the throughline of thirteen years with retailers and products around the world.

I lead as a player-coach — setting direction, growing a small team of design engineers, and still shipping code daily — partnering with product and stakeholders to craft experiences that are inclusive, scalable and resilient.

I'm a design engineer — thirteen years in the space where design and engineering meet — and Head of Design Engineering at Personio, where my work has gone fully AI-native: I build our Claude infrastructure (a marketplace, skills, MCP servers and cloud agents) and lead how a 40+ design org prototypes, generates and reviews UI with Claude.

Underneath that sits a career shipping the foundations of product web at scale — design systems, accessibility, performance, headless content, localization and experimentation — for John Lewis, ASOS, Woolworths and Waitrose.

I lead as a player-coach: I set direction, grow a small team of design engineers, and still ship code daily. I care most about the details — a permission prompt, a streaming token, a moment of latency — because that's where trust in a product is won or lost.

Responsibilities

Over the years I have been instrumental in establishing patterns for most frontend concerns:

AI tooling — Claude skills, MCP servers and agents
Design Systems — strategy, definition and build
Custom Tooling — Prototype playgrounds, Figma Plugins, Brand tools
Accessibility — WCAG AA compliance and testing
Interaction design — motion, micro-interactions and HCI
Performance + CWV — standards, metrics and budgeting
Data visualization — interactive, real-time and generative
CMS — architecture and structured content modelling
Localization — i18n infrastructure and multi-locale content
SEO — structured / open-graph data and best practice
Analytics / Instrumentation — OTel, Datadog, Amplitude
CRO + MVT — feature flags, cohorts, Split / Harness
Testing — unit / integration / E2E, a11y and visual regression
Resilience — shielding customers and self-healing
CI/CD — efficient developer experience, path-to-prod
Monorepos — Turborepo, Nx, lerna
GDPR — privacy, consent and permissions

Creating with

TypeScript
React
Claude
MCP
Figma
Next.js
Vercel
Motion
Superset
Storybook
Tailwind
Supabase
Resend
Playwright
Testing Library
Axe
Nx
Turborepo
Kubernetes
Datadog

Interests

A few things I enjoy making, learning and admiring
outside of work

Photography
Pottery
Interior design
Shaders
Micrographics
Typography

Work History

Personio

2025 — Present

Head of Design Engineering · London

Leading Design Infrastructure and solidifying the design team to be AI-native. I look after our visual language, the design system, and the tooling that lets a 200+ cross-functional community build with quality.

I'm reshaping how we prototype, generate, and review UI through AI-native workflows that protect and elevate our product quality bar. This mandate extends to co-leading our broader AI strategy, where I architect our internal Claude infrastructure across our marketplace, skills, MCPs, and agents.

Operating as a player-coach within the leadership team of a 40+ person design org, I set technical direction, grow a small team of design engineers, and still ship code daily.

2023 — 2025

Staff Engineer · London

Engineering lead for Personio's rebrand — making deep customisation and theming possible across the product, powered by our design system. I built the theming architecture and design-token pipeline (Style Dictionary, a generative colour engine) that let the whole UI re-skin from a single source of truth, then drove its adoption across teams.

Before that I led the Design System team, overhauling the components where design and engineering meet and raising the bar for accessibility, contribution and craft.

Upgrowth

2021 — 2023

Staff Design Engineer · Sydney

Led the Woolworths Design System and was a principal engineer on the BIG W website. Directed visual language expansion for the BIG W mobile app. Established Watchtowers — a wildfire command platform, now used by Australian fire agencies. I owned its product strategy, did the design end to end, and built the full frontend.

2020 — 2021

Senior Design Engineer · Sydney

Drove BIG W's digital transformation: decoupling the UI from a monolith into TypeScript with Next.js and Nest.js, an initial design-system setup, a move to headless AEM and a refined shopping journey. I also led product design across cyber-security, online publishing and ag-tech.

ASOS

2019

Senior Web Engineer · London

UI lead on the ASOS Marketplace re-platform — a full rewrite into TypeScript with Next.js, Algolia and Amplience, tested with Jest and Cypress. I upskilled the team across the frontend, running workshops on architecture, accessibility and cross-browser testing.

John Lewis & Partners

2016 — 2019

Senior UI Developer · London

Led UI for the John Lewis website and partner apps — the Pentagram rebrand, the “Mono” design system and the team behind it, and the move to a React, Node & Kubernetes stack. I introduced React to the business, led the CMS upgrade and shipped the new account area.

2015 — 2016

Web Designer · London

Design owner for the homepage, app content and the Electricals department — shaping the journeys for one of John Lewis's largest categories.

Waitrose & Partners

2013 — 2015

UI Designer & Frontend Developer · Bracknell

Designed, built and launched Cellar, Waitrose's new online wine service, then grew the platform across Kitchen, Florist, Gifts, Pet & Garden and Telegraph Wine subscriptions — owning the in-house frontend from design through to production.

Personio

2025 — Present