Suraj Vaidya
Senior Product Engineer, nine years in. I run discovery and wireframes, design the interface, build the component library, and then ship the front-end myself.
Most recently I led the redesign and front-end delivery of baesystems.com — a global corporate site serving millions — from discovery through production, and I'm now building D'ARK, a digital business card platform for UK SMEs, as founder and product engineer. Before that: a 1M+ user marketplace redesign at Qkly, design direction at Hiup, and front-end work at Leapfrog and Sofos. BSc (Hons) Information Technology, First Class, Coventry University.
I'm based in London and open to senior IC roles and selected client work — either a full design-to-build engagement, or dropping into an existing team to bring the design and engineering sides of a project back into the same conversation.
How I work
Wireframes before pixels
Every engagement starts with the problem, not the interface. I map flows and grey-box wireframes first — cheap to throw away, expensive to skip — so the structure of a product is settled before a single pixel is designed.
Systems, not screens
Colour, type and spacing become tokens, then components, before I let myself design a full page. It's slower for screen one and much faster for screen forty — and it's the only way a design system survives contact with a real codebase.
I ship the front-end
React, TypeScript, React Native, Angular, Tailwind, Magnolia CMS. The handover between design and engineering is where most products lose fidelity — I remove that step by writing the code myself, or by handing off a codebase built to the same tokens I designed with.
Track record
Frequently asked questions
The questions clients and recruiters actually ask, answered plainly.
What does a product engineer actually do?+
A product engineer owns a feature end to end rather than handing off between roles: researching the problem, designing the interface, and writing the front-end code that ships it. In practice that means one person carries an idea from a user interview through to production, instead of a designer and a developer each seeing half the picture.
What's the difference between a UI designer and a UX designer, and which one are you?+
UX design is the research and structure — who the user is, what they're trying to do, and what the flow should be before any screen is drawn. UI design is the visual and interaction layer on top of that structure — colour, type, spacing, states. I do both, and then write the React, TypeScript or Angular front-end that turns the UI into a shipped product.
How do you work with clients and teams?+
Discovery and wireframes first, usually low-fidelity and disposable, so structural decisions get tested cheaply before any visual design exists. Then a component-based UI in Figma, built to match a documented design system rather than one-off screens, followed by the front-end build — either mine directly or a codebase I hand off with the same tokens and components intact.
What do you charge for?+
Engagements are scoped per project — a case study, a design system build, a front-end delivery — rather than sold at a fixed public rate, since the right structure depends on scope, timeline and whether design, build or both are involved. Get in touch with what you're trying to build and I'll come back with a scope and a number.
What's your tech stack?+
React, TypeScript, React Native, Angular and Tailwind on the front-end; Figma for design, tokens and prototyping; and D3.js when a project needs custom data visualisation. Recent production work includes Magnolia CMS (baesystems.com) and a from-scratch design system in React and Tailwind for D'ARK.
Are you available for freelance or contract work?+
Yes — I'm based in London, open to senior IC roles and selected client work, and take on both short scoped engagements (a design system audit, a single case-study-worthy feature) and longer contracts. See the Contact page for the fastest way to reach me.