Henry Kaufman

Senior Design Engineer · Boston, MA

I design product and ship the code behind it.

About

Too late for the dot-com bubble, too early to be an iPad kid. I grew up playing video games, tinkering with computers, and learning to code at 13.

Coding pulled me into design before long. I cared as much about how things looked as how they worked, and split my time between the two for years without fully committing to one side.

For a while that pull felt like a problem. Now, with tools that put ideas in front of users in days instead of months, sitting in the intersection is the point.

CS and philosophy at Boston University, class of 2021. Picked up philosophy because the questions I cared about most rarely resolved cleanly.

Outside of work, I'm usually spending time in the outdoors: running, cycling, or skiing.

Experience

  1. Senior Design Engineer · Aspect

    Jan 2026 – Present

    Boston, MA · Remote

    • Title adjusted to formalize the design ↔ engineering scope I was already operating across.
    • Driving Facet adoption into WEM, Aspect’s flagship product: a 20+ year old codebase built on Less, jQuery, and Knockout.js. Modernizing patterns single-handedly.
    • Built a React proof-of-concept rebuild of WFX to demonstrate shipping velocity over the existing Vue stack, informing platform direction.

  2. Senior Product Designer · Aspect

    Feb 2024 – Jan 2026

    Boston, MA · Remote

    • Designed and shipped Facet (Summer/Fall 2025), the production design system for Aspect’s WFX product. Owned the full pipeline: Figma component library → exported design tokens → Vue.js + Storybook implementation, with 1:1 parity between design and code.
    • Operated at the seam between design and engineering, leading to the Senior Design Engineer title in Jan 2026.

  3. Co-Founder · CTO · Lead Designer · CoStudy

    Apr 2019 – Present

    Boston, MA · Remote

    Next-generation peer evaluations providing customizable, research-based insights for professors in higher education.

    • Single-handedly designed and developed a fully functioning product serving hundreds of professors and thousands of students across a dozen universities.
    • Scaled and matured the product over multiple years, informed by direct user interviews with professors.
    • Deployed and provided business-hours support for customers alongside my co-founder.

  4. Product Designer · Just Appraised

    May 2020 – Feb 2024

    Boston, MA · Full-time · Remote

    • Designed and developed Just Appraised’s React-based design system, the foundation for all subsequent product initiatives.
    • Led design across a dozen+ initiatives over three years, coordinating with product and engineering to maintain implementation consistency.
    • Spearheaded internal design feedback and user research sessions, informing both new initiatives and ongoing UX improvements.

  5. Software Engineer · Robin

    Nov 2019 – May 2020

    Boston, MA · Part-time · Hybrid

  6. Software Engineering Intern · Robin

    May 2019 – Nov 2019

    Boston, MA · Internship

    • Built browser extensions for Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook in React.js, working in Scrum with a team of six.
    • Partnered with the design team to implement a shared design system, ensuring consistency across products.

Selected Work

  1. Facet → WEM legacy port

    Aspect · 2026

    Porting Facet into WEM, Aspect’s flagship product — a 20-year-old codebase on Less, jQuery, and Knockout.js. Building Facet from scratch was the easy part. Landing it on top of two decades of stacked CSS — without breaking anyone’s muscle memory — is the work.

  2. Facet design system

    Aspect · 2024–present

    Designed and built Aspect’s design system end-to-end: Figma component library, exported tokens, Vue.js + Storybook implementation. Source-of-truth design changes propagate to production code automatically — no design-to-engineering handoff overhead.

  3. CoStudy

    Co-founder · 2019–present

    Peer-evaluation platform for higher education. I co-founded CoStudy in 2019. Solo on the design and engineering side for seven years. A dozen universities, a few thousand students per semester.

Education

  1. BA, Computer Science · Boston University

    2018 – 2021

    Minor in Philosophy. Graduated cum laude.