Head of Design at Join, helping humanize construction. I prototype in code with AI — the latest platform bet landed as ~25 Claude Code PRs against real customer data — and my team ships the same way. Before that, founding designer at Blockdaemon, where design grew from one person (me) to seven, and design lead at Gradle and Walmart.
Ari Zilnik
Design leader who still ships.
Selected work

Join
Reporting Platform
Customers spent 5–10 hrs/week stitching PDFs into owner packets. Reframed reports as a first-class surface — ~25 AI-coded PRs in two months.

Join
AI Recommendation Engine
AI finds cost-saving material alternatives inside estimates. Pivoted from marketplace, shipped in two months.

Join
Construction Scenario Comparison
Side-by-side what-if comparison. Owners weigh whole packages, not forty line items.

Blockdaemon
Institutional Crypto Staking Dashboard
Zero-to-one staking dashboard and API marketplace. Shipped while scaling the design org 1 to 7.

Join
Project-First Navigation
Rebuilt navigation around projects after feature drift broke the mental model. Support tickets dropped 32%.

Blockdaemon
Node Deployment Flow
Node deployment as e-commerce checkout. Self-serve replaced a multi-week sales cycle — usage grew 23x.

Gradle
Flexible Filtering for Developer Diagnostics
One typed input replaced a dozen dropdowns. Same surface for experts and beginners.
Building

Open Source
Claude Usage on a 240-Pixel Screen
A $20 desk display, and the discipline of designing honestly at 240px.

Open Source
An Operating System as a Checkout Flow
Dual-boot risk removed. One command to a running Linux desktop.

Open Source
Smart Hood Vent Automation
Rate-of-change smoke detection. 30 seconds, not 10 minutes. ~$85, open source.