Design engineer,
builder, and musician.
I’m Alex Martinez, a design engineer with 20 years of experience across visual design, product design, and frontend implementation. I work where product decisions, interface systems, and code meet.
I studied Systems Engineering and Graphic Design, and that overlap has followed me through my career. I started by designing and building digital experiences, moved deeper into product design, and never really stopped coding.
I currently design developer tools at Datadog. Before that, as founding designer at Codiga, I shaped products across web, IDE, and desktop experiences before the company was acquired by Datadog.
My public work is intentionally code-forward: React and TypeScript interfaces, developer tools, and experiments such as Lint UI where design quality is part of the implementation itself.
Outside of screens I play guitar, record music, and in 2019 pressed a vinyl record with my band Los Monoplonicos. I think about interface design the same way I think about arrangement: every element earns its place or it’s gone.
- 2022, nowProduct DesignerDatadog
- 2020, 2022Founding Product DesignerCodiga
- EarlierDesigner & Frontend DeveloperVarious
A measured process.
Real momentum.
Enough structure to stay aligned, enough flexibility to discover the right answer.
Understand
Research the context, users, constraints, and the decision behind the brief.
Shape
Model the system and explore the experience through focused prototypes.
Build
Bring the strongest direction into code and refine against reality.
Ship
Partner through implementation, polish the details, and learn from use.
Less ceremony.
More useful evidence.
Figma, prototypes, code, PRs, conversations, and documentation are tools, not milestones. I use the smallest combination that helps the team make a better decision and move the product forward.