Marcel Akiyama

I'm a senior product designer with 8+ years of experience across fintech, developer tools, B2B SaaS, and AI. I help companies save time and money by catching product problems early, reducing avoidable rework, and helping teams make better decisions sooner.

As a founding designer at Alpaca (YC W19), I helped shape products through its evolution from machine learning for financial markets to an API-first brokerage.

My work connects UX research, product design, design systems, human–AI interaction, and hands-on implementation. I challenge assumptions, translate evidence into design decisions, and build working interfaces to test how they hold up in practice. I also help teams spot when polished AI output masks unresolved questions or errors.

I'm interested in Senior and Staff roles in Product Design and Design Systems, or research roles that directly shape product decisions.