Download PDF ↓
charleskete.com
charleskete@me.com
(310) 409-8584
San Francisco Bay Area

Charles Amadeus Kete

Design Director · Product Designer · Software Engineer

Design Director, software engineer, and product designer from Nice, France — over sixteen years at the boundary of design and engineering, from Apple’s Human Interface team to Head of Design at Gradle Inc. I practice programmatic design: user empathy fused with implementation fluency, earned on both sides of the fence as engineer and designer.

Experience

Head of Design

Feb 2023 – Jun 2026

Gradle Inc. · SF Bay Area · Remote

  • Led a ten-person team — product design, brand, video, copy, front-end engineering — across Develocity, gradle.com, the DPE Summit brand, and the Kradle design system.
  • Shipped the full redesign and rebrand — gradle.com is now develocity.ai — on a token-driven web design system wired into Claude and Figma MCP: 10× faster page iteration.
  • Redesigned Develocity’s build observability — Trends, Failures, Tests, Predictive Test Selection — into one legible system for engineering teams from OpenAI to Volvo.

Head of Product Design

Mar 2022 – Jan 2023

Ribbon (by Hurst Lending) · SF Bay Area

  • Led design across the RibbonCash+ offer platform and mobile app — redesigned end to end: +38% offer acceptance, −2.3 days median intent-to-offer.
  • Stood up Quilt, Ribbon’s atomic design system, and prototyped Fragments — fractional home ownership for everyday renters — end to end.

Head of Design

Jan 2020 – Feb 2022

REX · Woodland Hills, CA

  • Hired and led a team of eight across product design, multimedia, and product management at the tech-first brokerage built to break the 6% commission.
  • Reimagined rexhomes.com and the REX App on one design system across iOS, Android, and web: +118% organic traffic, 2.7× listing-page engagement, −44% time to first tour.

Director of Design & Engineering

Jan 2015 – Jan 2020

Abena North America · Los Angeles, CA

  • Led a five-person design and engineering team across web, app, print, and packaging — including the Bambo Nature retail line and #ParentFearlessly campaign.
  • Rebuilt abenausa.com and its Fitting Room on a bespoke Tailwind CSS + CSS Grid design system, an early champion of that stack: 2.4× conversion, +146% session length.

System Engineer

Jul 2013 – Nov 2015

Ross & Baruzzini · St. Louis, MO

  • Engineered audiovisual, acoustic, and communications systems for large-scale transit, healthcare, and civic facilities (EASE 4.0, AutoCAD).

Earlier

Apple — Product Design Engineer (2010 – 2012) · Human Interface team, refining the next evolution of Aqua — hybrid design-engineering on Maps Flyover’s camera, compass, and POI cards, and on how Keynote’s Instant Alpha and Magic Move felt.