Dan Rosenthal

I build design systems, lead interface teams, and make new technology feel obvious to the people using it.

Based in Cincinnati. Fifteen years building for the web, most of them on design systems, accessibility, and UI infrastructure.

Index

Equal parts systems thinker, interface obsessive, and recovering copywriter.

Most of my job now is people: hiring, mentoring, performance reviews, and the hard conversations that keep a team honest. The rest is the layer underneath, the components and tokens other teams build on.

The copywriting habit never left. Say it clearly, then get out of the way, whether it’s a sentence, a button, or a whole design system.

Now: Engineering manager, Online Store buyer experiences, Shopify
Before: Technical lead on HubSpot’s next-generation design system
Earlier: Six years at Shopify: Polaris, a gift card rebuild, and leading the Checkout Design System team
Started in: Words: fact-checking at Cincinnati Magazine, product copy at School Outfitters, editing at Uncrate
Studied: BA in English, Wittenberg University; AAS in Web Design, Cincinnati State
Off the clock: Dad. Midwesterner. INTJ, Enneagram 8.

Where I do my best work.

Design systems

Polaris, Checkout UI, HubSpot’s next-generation system: tokens, components, and multi-brand foundations teams can build on.

Accessibility

Accessible by default, not by audit: labeling wired in automatically, keyboard navigation designed in from the first commit.

UI infrastructure

Performance, stability, resiliency, and observability across the front end and the systems behind it.

AI in commerce

Putting LLMs to work where they actually help: in the product for buyers, and in the toolchain for the engineers building it.

From ambiguity to a system people can use.

Shopify / 2025–now

Rebuilding the storefront for AI

Engineering manager for Online Store buyer experiences, leading a team from interns to staff+. Building foundational design systems for commerce and making storefronts faster, steadier, and easier to observe.

HubSpot / 2022–2025

A design system, rebuilt

Technical lead on HubSpot’s next-generation design system: multi-brand, accessibility-first, composable. Architected the DataGrid behind index pages in 2,000+ HubSpot apps.

Shopify / 2016–2022

From Polaris to Checkout

Top-five contributor to Polaris React and Rails, then grew the Checkout Design System team from 3 to 9 engineers and launched the Branding API for customizing checkout.

Operating principles

Clarity is a feature.
Systems should create freedom.
The details are the product.

Bring me the messy problem.

A talk, an advisory gig, or a hard design systems question. Tell me what you’re working on.

Or find me on LinkedIn