Hello, I'm Sam Caldera.

I began my design career as a product manager and UX designer for the Travel Vertical at Internet Brands in El Segundo, CA. There, I collaborated with cross-functional managers to shape product strategy and roadmaps and collaborated with UI designers to deliver appealing features to the various properties in the vertical.
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From there, I joined Leaf Group as a dedicated product designer for an internal tool where I implemented an atomic design system that expedited our feature development and started steps toward establishing UX/UI consistency on existing and new features.
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Soon after, I was promoted to Product Design Lead in which I was tasked with overseeing design efforts for consumer-facing media properties and the internal tools that supported them. As part of this role, I refined my cross-functional collaboration with managers and ICs of teams like product, engineering, editorial, sales, QA, finance, and more. I also developed effective people management skills by mentoring and developing junior and mid-level design ICs.
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While, serving as a Product Design Lead, I decided to pursue a masters in HCI at UC Irvine. This experience allowed me to develop a more well-rounded confidence in my point of view as a designer. I served as a Produce Design Lead + Strategist for my capstone team; we delivered a Settings UI for Project Jupyter’s JupyterLab (a data science IDE) that’s now shipped and available to all JupyterLab users.
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Today, I’m a freelance product designer open to working with teams on either a full-time or project basis.