Brandon Figarella
Product Engineer
Product Engineer covering the full loop: research the stack, design the system, ship the code. UIs in React and Next.js; backends in Node.js, Python, and Rust. Built with the teams and communities that use them.
Education
University of California, Santa Cruz
Bachelor of Arts in Creative Technologies
Dean's Honors (Winter 2025, Spring 2025); Creative Technologies Program Representative
Expected June 2026
GPA: 3.90
West Valley College
Associate of Arts in UX and App Design
May 2023
Projects
WavHaven
Data-Driven Music Marketplace
- •Redesigned the producer upload flow after mapping how people actually used it. Upload time dropped 75% and 90% of user feedback came back positive.
- •Built the frontend in Next.js and TypeScript, with Zustand managing global state (audio player, cart).
- •Built a serverless backend on a CQRS pattern with Next.js Server Actions and Python Supabase Edge Functions.
- •Implemented an AI discovery engine using PostgreSQL with pgvector for semantic similarity search on audio embeddings.
- •Set up CI with Vitest unit tests and Playwright end-to-end tests.
Omnidex
Desktop Application for Unreal Engine Asset Management
- •Designed the asset search flow from prototypes tested with users. Finding an asset takes seconds instead of minutes of folder browsing.
- •Built the multi-pane UI with Vue.js, Pinia, and TypeScript. Virtualized scrolling keeps large libraries responsive.
- •Tauri (Rust) backend runs local indexing against SQLite. Everything works offline.
Skills
Frontend:
React, Next.js (App Router), Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, Zustand, Pinia, shadcn/ui
Backend:
Node.js, Next.js Server Actions, Python, Rust (Tauri), Supabase, CQRS Pattern
Programming Languages:
TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Rust, SQL, HTML/CSS
UX/UI Design:
User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Flows, Design Systems, Figma
Databases & Data:
PostgreSQL, SQLite, pgvector, Embedding Generation, AI Similarity Search
Infrastructure Tools:
Docker, Git, CI/CD, Vercel, Vitest, Playwright, Stripe, Clerk, PostHog