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 20+ year old flagship (Less, jQuery, Knockout.js). Chose foundation-first over surface-by-surface: tokens and type land once, so the same change isn’t repeated across hundreds of screens, each with its own regression risk.
    • Built a React proof-of-concept rebuild of WFX to make the case for shipping velocity over the existing Vue stack. It informed the 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.

    • Sole owner of the entire product for seven years: product direction, design, and engineering. Serving hundreds of professors and thousands of students across a dozen universities.
    • Shaped the roadmap through direct professor interviews, and navigated the ed-tech reality that the buyer, the chooser, and the user are three different people; procurement is part of the product, not downstream of it.
    • Made the product and architecture calls with an eye to what one person can sustain for years, and run it in production, splitting support with a co-founder who leads sales and strategy.

  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 design system

    Aspect · 2024–present

    Aspect’s first design hire, building the design system WFX runs on. Every architectural call was mine, from a custom Figma token plugin over off-the-shelf tooling to a semantic token layer that lets a rebrand ship without touching product code.

  2. 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.

  3. CoStudy

    Co-founder · 2019–present

    Peer-evaluation platform for higher ed, co-founded in 2019. I own the whole product for seven years: the design, the engineering, and the business calls, across a dozen universities and a few thousand students a semester.

Education

  1. BA, Computer Science · Boston University

    2018 – 2021

    Minor in Philosophy. Graduated cum laude.