Amazon SageMaker Notebooks

Situation

I was working as a Senior Design Technologist on the Sagemaker Unified Studio UX team. The team consisted of approximately 8 UX designers and myself. Adjacent to our team were several engineering teams working on various Micro-front-ends and other features. It was September 2025 and Re:Invent was just around the corner, in December of that year. There was a huge need for assistance with the UI of the Sagemaker Notebook product, a brand new product set to launch at Re:Invent.

Task

I was asked to help lead the styling for the UI components and ensure they met both the design system standards, as well as the UX guidelines.

Action

The lead UX designer and I met almost daily to discuss the design and implementation of the product. There, I would advise on feasible approaches, prototyping components where necessary, or making code changes to ensure the designs were faithfully translated into the product. At the same time, I would attend daily standups with the engineering team to ensure the product was on track. I would reivew code and pair with engineers to ensure the product was meeting the quality bar. In some cases, I would advise on the best way to approach a particular problem. For example, in how to balance the use of styled components and CSS in order to optimize performance.

To add another layer of complexity, the design system was being updated to version 2.0. This meant that when we started on development, what we had under the hood, was not going to be the same in the end product. So, I would work closely with the design systems team to ensure that the new design system was being used in the right way. The challenge was that there were also components that called for a design that the design system team had not yet created. So, I worked with the UX designer and built many of those components myself. In other cases, a front-end engineer would build the component, and then I would follow up with building the styling to ensure that the end UI matched the UX design. Since the design system was being updated, I had to iterate a number of times throughout the project to ensure that the UI was correct so that leadership could review the progress.

Result

My contributions directly contributed to the end customer experience and ensured that the right UX was delivered. My attention to detail resulted in a pixel perfect polish for the Re:Invent debut. This work was later showcased by an AWS VP during one of the 2025 re:Invent keynote presentations. I took strong ownership of UI quality by following up on work across teams and making sure every detail met a high bar.