RésuméCalifornia

Ioan Popa.

Principal Product Designer & AI Lead

I design interfaces, build working prototypes and fine-tune models for hard problems that matter.

Experience.

20+ years in design

May 2019 – present

Splunk → Cisco

Principal Product Designer & AI Lead

Enterprise data, mobile systems and AI workflows.

  • Led Search & Dashboards design with a three-person design team, connecting search, visualization and dashboards. Shipped in November 2022; prototype research involved seven external users.
  • Led mobile design work and developed Splunk’s first mobile design system. Worked across product patterns, illustration and icon systems.
  • Designed across data-ingestion architecture, McLaren race telemetry and Project UME mobile R&D.

September 2015 – May 2019

Replicon

Principal Designer

Time and attendance across mobile and shared devices.

  • Redesigned mobile timesheets around visible entry details, reuse, time off and weekly summaries.
  • Designed Cloud Clock around recognition and the next relevant action on a shared workplace kiosk.
  • Sole designer on Time Intelligence R&D: an inferred activity timeline that people can inspect, split and merge.

April 2014 – September 2015

Engage3

Principal Designer

Consumer shopping across iOS, Android and responsive web.

  • Led UX/UI design for ShoppingScout, including onboarding and guidance for comparing stores.

2004 – 2014

Earlier practice

Design & front-end development

Interface design, independent products and freelance engagements.

  • Co-founded and led product UX/UI for Wallz (2013–2014). Freelance lead UX/UI work for Zapp (2014) focused on explaining mobile payment and the handoff to a banking app.

Independent work.

Projects I chose to make, from the problem to the working product.

Cozonac

A self-initiated visual AI builder. I designed and built reference review, visual editing and checkpoint recovery.

Memory Bridge

A self-initiated photo-restoration prototype. I designed review before saving, with explicit choices around restoration and new scenes.

Image models & Image Studio

I fine-tune image models and their text encoders, add reference support, and build the tools to use them. My Diffusers studio brings prompts, @image and @lora references into one workspace.

How I work.

I’m drawn to hard problems where getting the design right can make a difference. I work through the system, build the difficult interactions and make the result clear enough for someone else to use.

  • Product strategy
  • Interaction design
  • Design systems
  • Enterprise data visualization
  • Research & prototyping
  • AI workflows & model fine-tuning
  • Creative direction & mentoring

40 utility and design patents: 23 utility, 17 design. Award-winning astrophotographer.

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