I'm Kevin Gates, a design technologist working at the intersection of design, engineering and ML/AI for complex systems.
Background & Vision
I tend to gravitate towards the boundary between design and engineering. I was part of a three-person team that built Google's early BI tools, designed and shipped a voter-facing app for the Obama 2012 campaign, and spearheaded a cloud platform monitoring solution that gained 100% traction with Pivotal's Fortune 500 customers.
I'm paricularly interested in how emerging technology can augment, enhance and benefit users. Overall, as design and engineering merge together, I believe design needs to be in two places at the same time: 1) Redefining how users interact with machines, and 2) Creating the next wave of dev tools that enable this new kind of software.
Experience
Rise8 (Embedded in U.S. Space Command)
Dual-Hat PM/Designer: DevEx for forward ground radar & space-based interceptors
FlexPort
Design Lead: data & machine-learning platform
Pivotal
Staff Designer: Cloud platform observability, PKS (Pivotal's K8s offering), KNative
Practice Fusion
Data Visualization Engineer: Medical informatics, PF Second Opinion, a social platform for doctors
Obama for America
Concept development, design, and engineering for voter-facing app
Design and Development: Business intelligence, data engineering
R/GA
Design-Technologist: Nike Lab, P&G, BofA
Skills
Design & Product
AI-native product design
Product strategy
Risk-driven product roadmapping
Data visualization
Information-dense UI/UX design
Developer experience
Prototyping (React, React Native, Python)
Service Design / DDD
Technology
Python · React
CLI/TUI · Bubble Tea · Cobra
Kubernetes · AWS
Data & ML systems
Local LLMs (Gemma)
Gesture capture
AI / ML / LLMs
AI-native interfaces
Naturalistic interactions (gestures, speech)
Agents & tool use
Multimodal interaction