Senior Product
Designer + Engineer
I design SaaS products and ship the code that runs them. Five AI-native products built and prototyped end to end in the last two years. UX research and brand systems through React, TypeScript, and production deploys.
Three things, all in service of shipping
Design, brand, and engineering, run by one person, on the same process.
Web Design + UI/UX
Marketing sites, dashboards, and customer portals built around the work the user actually has to do. Research, IA, wireframes, hi-fi design, responsive build.
Brand Identity for Digital Products
Logo, type, color, and component-level brand systems that hold up across product surfaces, marketing, and growth. Built to scale across sub-brands.
AI-Native Product Engineering
End-to-end SaaS builds with React, TypeScript, Supabase, and AI provider routing. Stripe checkout, edge functions, agent orchestration. The pipeline that ships my own products is the same one I bring to client work.
Production-grade process
for digital products
Predictable outcomes, not creative gambles. Every project moves through the same six stages, with clear deliverables and acceptance criteria at each checkpoint. You know what you're getting before it ships — and so do I.
Discover
Research the user, the market, and the constraints. Audit what exists. Document the brief in a single page everyone signs off on.
Define
Sharp problem statement. Success metrics tied to outcomes, not vanity. Scope boundaries with what is in and what is out, written down.
Design
Wireframes, design system, prototypes. Test the riskiest assumption first. Validate with real users before pixel polish.
Build
Production code, production files. Versioned, reviewed, tested, integrated. Spec-driven with preflight checks before anything ships.
Ship
Staged release with monitoring and rollback ready. Real users in the loop early. Communication channel open while the dust settles.
Refine
Feedback, instrumentation, iteration. The next version is informed by the last. No project ends, it transitions to maintenance with a clean handoff.
Why this matters. Hiring a designer is supposed to be the start of certainty about your product, not the start of guesswork. The process above means you know what you are getting at every checkpoint, and so do I. Clients see fewer surprises. Engineers get specs they can build from. Stakeholders see progress in artifacts, not in meetings.
Featured Work
A selection of projects that showcase the impact of thoughtful design.
Portal747
AI Business-in-a-Box. A 23-agent build pipeline that takes a single prompt and produces a full brand and marketing site, copy, image set, video shots, and social posts. Pre-launch.
Upscale Forge
AI image and video creative suite. Tiered subscription with browser-side ESRGAN for the free tier and a server-side pipeline for higher resolutions and AI generation. Pre-launch.
GoInspect.ai
Vertical SaaS for home inspectors. AI-native report builder trained on industry vocabulary. 14-day free trial, four subscription tiers, three credit packs. Heading into closed beta with field testers this month.
My Portfolio
Three SaaS products and a decade of client work. Click any tile for the case study.
Luke Cakalic
Senior Product Designer + Engineer
Colorado Springs, CO
About Me
I'm Luke. I design SaaS products and ship the code that runs them. I work the seam between product design and engineering, where most teams need two people to do what I do alone.
Owned Cloud Mountain Graphics for over a decade, working with clients across green tech, aerospace parts, telecom supply, manufacturing, and home inspection. Held formal UX/UI Designer roles at scaled software companies, designing customer portals and onboarding flows in Agile teams. Specifics on LinkedIn.
The last two years I have been heads-down building AI-native SaaS products inside CMG R&D. Three featured here: Portal747 (an AI build pipeline), Upscale Forge (a creative suite), and GoInspect.ai (a vertical SaaS for home inspectors heading into closed beta). All built and prototyped to launch readiness, with others rolling out as their respective branding lands.
An earlier career in production work taught me that acceptance criteria and preflight checks are what separate "the project shipped" from "the project shipped twice."
What I am looking for next: a senior product design or design engineering role at a company shipping AI-native products, where production discipline gets put to work on a team that values it. Remote preferred. On-site or hybrid in the Colorado Front Range works too.
Stack & Tools
Let's Connect
Open to senior product design and design engineering roles, plus select client work through Cloud Mountain Graphics. Drop a note.