Jesse Kulp
I design AI‑native tools and surfaces — and use them to build my own.
Experience
Jan 2026 — Present
Apple—Member of the Design Staff, Apple IntelligenceNow
Mar 2024 — Jan 2026
Google DeepMind—Founding Designer, Google AI Studio
Founding designer for AI Studio, the surface where developers meet Gemini. Joined a team of fewer than ten as its only designer or researcher, growing the design function to four designers; reported to a VP. Ran the research that reset the product’s direction — sixteen hour-long interviews with Google Developer Experts, early-access developers and heavy users — and turned the finding into an IA that engineering could build against.
Rebuilt the landing and the conversation canvas, designed the model picker and run settings, and set the design system that held product and marketing to one voice as the platform expanded into live and generative media. Success was measured as content generated, not signups. 15.5M+ monthly active users, 9.5M of them generating content, and 40% month-on-month growth after GA — as reported early 2025.
2021 — 2024
Google—UX Lead, ML Developer Platforms
Design lead across Google’s machine learning platforms — two developer-facing surfaces that preceded AI Studio, and the internal evaluation tooling ML engineers used to benchmark model performance. Roughly twelve designers across four cross-product teams. Co-led the Responsible AI and data-accessibility visualisation work across those surfaces.
2020 — 2021
Google—Senior UX Lead, Google Cloud
Charting and dashboards for Google Cloud — the console surfaces teams read to know what their systems are doing.
2018 — 2020
Splunk—Principal UX Design Lead
Data Stream Processor. Four direct reports, eight across the team. Building a pipeline meant assembling it, shipping it and finding out later; we put live events beside the canvas so operators could validate before deploy instead of after. Shipped the monitoring grid, the usage dashboards operators read daily, and the investigation view for the moments they don’t.. Most of the design was the unhappy path — a stage that parses wrong, a route that quietly doubles a bill — so validation moved before deploy, while the mistake is still cheap. Post-GA telemetry then decided what got built next
2016 — 2018
BMC Software—Principal UX Designer
Enterprise operations tooling — surfaces for people accountable for systems already running. Designed and evangelised a company-wide UI framework and pattern library — 100+ components, 50+ patterns. Surveys returned a 58% rise in customer satisfaction, three more minutes on site, and a 42% quarter-on-quarter lift in conversion.
2014 — 2016
Amazon—Senior UX Designer
Amazon Household. Sole designer on a team of roughly twenty-five; mobile usage rose 61% year on year. Shared benefits, household profiles, and the permission model underneath: who belongs, what they can reach, and who may act on whose behalf.
2013 — 2014
Critical Mass—Senior UX Designer