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Maya OkaforDesign engineer

Open to new work from January 2027

I design and build interfaces that feel inevitable.

Design engineer with nine years between Figma and production. I turn fuzzy product ideas into fast, accessible React interfaces — and the design systems that keep them consistent once I've left the room.

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Now
Lead DE at Ledgerly
Based
London, UK
Focus
Design systems · UI
Maya Okafor seated by a studio window, wearing a charcoal sweater

Latest launch

Ledgerly design system — 140 screens, one library

Read the case study
London
shipping product UI
9yrs

shipping product UI

launches to production
40+

launches to production

GitHub stars on Kiln
6.2k★

GitHub stars on Kiln

Lighthouse a11y, every launch
100

Lighthouse a11y, every launch

01Selected work

Recent projects, from first sketch to shipped

All 6 projects
Ledgerly analytics dashboard on a laptop resting on a warm paper surface
  • Design systems
  • React

Ledgerly

Rebuilding a ten-year-old finance product on one design system

2026
Two phones running the Tidepool app on dark rocks beside a tide pool
  • Mobile
  • Offline-first

Tidepool

Offline-first field notes for marine researchers

2025
A dark terminal window beside a small ceramic kiln object
  • Open source
  • Tooling

Kiln

A design-token compiler that a few thousand teams depend on

2024
Station display showing a glowing transit map with the harbour behind
  • Data viz
  • Real-time

Harbor Transit

A real-time transit map people actually read at a glance

2023

02Toolkit

The stack I reach for

Fluent across the whole path from a Figma frame to a deployed, tested component — and opinionated about the bits in between.

  1. 01

    Prototype in the real material

    A clickable thing in the browser settles arguments a static frame never will.

  2. 02

    Accessibility is the baseline

    Keyboard, contrast and screen readers are part of done, not a later ticket.

  3. 03

    Systems over screens

    I'd rather ship ten components a team can reuse than one perfect page.

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • Rust
  • Go
  • SQL

Front-end

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TanStack
  • Svelte
  • Tailwind
  • Radix
  • WebGL

Design

  • Figma
  • Design tokens
  • Prototyping
  • Motion
  • Accessibility
  • User research

Platform

  • Node
  • Vite
  • Postgres
  • Cloudflare
  • Playwright
  • Storybook
  • CI/CD

03Experience

Where I've done the work

Full CV

  1. 2024 — Present

    Ledgerly

    Lead Design Engineer

    Leading a four-person design engineering team across the reporting suite.

  2. 2022 — 2024

    Harbor City Transport

    Senior Front-end Engineer

    Real-time maps and departure boards for buses and ferries.

  3. 2020 — 2022

    Atlas Labs

    Front-end Engineer

    Collaborative canvas, presence and performance.

What's next

Have a product that needs a design engineer?

I take on two or three engagements a year — design systems, product UI and the prototypes that get teams to yes.

Start a project [email protected]