Julio Gonzalez
Summary
I am a senior product designer who works best at the intersection of visual craft, systems thinking, and emerging technology. Before designing software at American Express, Amazon, and Google, I spent a decade as a studio assistant to artist Robert Longo, where I learned how to collaborate on a demanding creative team while developing a deep discipline around precision, composition, and visual execution. That background still shapes how I approach product design. I care about craft, but I am most interested in how craft serves complex systems.
Most recently, I have been designing and building a native iOS music discovery app end-to-end, including the interface, interaction model, React Native and Expo implementation, Supabase data pipelines, and recommendation logic. That hands-on engineering work has changed how I design by helping me prototype closer to reality, reason through technical tradeoffs, and turn ambiguous AI capabilities into polished, usable product experiences.
Experience
Cthru Music Player
Design Engineer & Founder | January 2026 - Present | San Francisco, CA
- Designing and building a native iOS music discovery app using React Native, Expo, and Supabase, spanning product strategy, UI design, front-end architecture, backend scripts, and media playback.
- Developed custom data pipelines and recommendation logic to generate personalized music stations focused on musical coherence, discovery, and seamless listening.
- Built an AI-assisted development workflow using context documentation, durable coding rules, isolated worktrees, and software agents to accelerate implementation while maintaining product quality.
Google, AI for Cloud Business Intelligence
Senior Product Designer | January 2024 - December 2025 | San Francisco, CA
- Led design for Data Canvas in BigQuery, an AI-first exploratory data analysis interface that grew monthly active users by 63% during the first six months of my tenure.
- Established foundational UX patterns for an AI agent authoring tool across BigQuery, Looker, and Looker Studio, enabling data experts to add business context and improve agent accuracy by 10% to 20% in early evaluations.
- Led UX for an AI-powered conversational analytics initiative in BigQuery, coordinating design delivery across two product and engineering teams and helping move the product from design to release in a single quarter.
- Designed core conversational analytics components, including agent responses with visualizations and interaction patterns for chat-with-your-data workflows.
- Advocated for the migration from Material 2 to Material 3 for Conversational Analytics in Looker Studio, improving consistency and modernization across the product experience.
Amazon, Buy with Prime
User Experience Designer | September 2022 - November 2023 | San Francisco, CA
- Designed growth and onboarding experiences for Buy with Prime, an early-stage B2B product that enables merchants to offer Amazon Prime benefits on third-party e-commerce sites.
- Redesigned a complex partner API connector for automated checkout emails, reducing a highly technical setup flow into a simple three-step experience and improving task completion in usability testing.
- Designed a pricing calculator and global account management features for multi-account users, helping merchants understand costs and manage cross-channel operations more efficiently.
American Express, Enterprise Mobile
Lead Product Designer | January 2019 - August 2022 | New York, NY
- Led design across Search, Chat, Benefits, and Loyalty for the American Express consumer mobile app, serving 20M monthly active users across 20 global markets on iOS and Android.
- Designed an offers experience that drove a 533% year-over-year increase in offers added to card, exceeding the target OKR.
- Contributed to the mobile design system used by 20 designers and approximately 60 engineers, creating patterns for data visualization, input fields, maps, motion, and semantic color.
- Helped launch dark mode through the mobile design system, reaching 40% user adoption in the first month after release.
- Partnered with Product, Engineering, and Research to define a three-year mobile vision, shift the app from an account-based to a customer-based information architecture, and support the launch of the first checking account product.
- Developed the mobile team's first design QA process and conducted monthly usability testing with high-fidelity prototypes to reduce design risk and improve implementation quality.
American Express, Data & Analytics
UX/UI Designer | March 2018 - December 2018 | New York, NY
- Designed internal data analysis web applications for a big data platform, including a data library search tool, an extract-transform-load tool, and a CRM platform.
Robert Longo Studio
Studio Assistant | February 2006 - November 2017 | New York, NY
- Led teams of artists in the production of large-scale charcoal drawings exhibited in major galleries and museums worldwide, developing a disciplined approach to creative collaboration, precision, composition, and visual execution.
Education
General Assembly
UX Design Immersive Certificate | 2017 | New York, NY
Rhode Island School of Design
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film, Animation, and Video | 2005 | Providence, RI
Skills & Tools
Product Design: UX Design, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Information Architecture, Design Systems, Mobile Design, Enterprise UX, AI Product Design
Research & Strategy: Usability Testing, Product Strategy, Journey Mapping, Cross-functional Collaboration
Design Engineering: AI-assisted Prototyping, Design-to-Code Workflows, Interaction Specification, Design QA
Tools: Figma, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, ProtoPie