Yingying Zhang

Yingying Zhang

Product Designer · AI and Complex Systems · Seattle, WA

· linkedin.com/in/zhangyingying · yingyingz.com


Summary

A product designer with 15+ years designing AI-powered systems, complex cloud infrastructure, and enterprise SaaS. I turn ambiguous technical and AI strategy into product direction, workflows, and experiences that help people understand, trust, and control complex systems. At Amazon Web Services, I define AI-native experience visions, lead cross-functional design across large engineering organizations, prototype directly with tools like Claude Code to test ideas before committing engineering time, and create frameworks that scale design quality beyond my own work. Recognized for top-tier performance and leadership impact at AWS.

Experience

Amazon Web Services

Senior UX Designer · 2020 – Present · Seattle, WA

Lead AI-native and complex-systems design across AWS IoT and enterprise workflows, turning infrastructure complexity into guided experiences, product direction, and scalable design frameworks.

Selected impact
  • Designed control boundaries for an AI teammate operating in high-stakes contexts; ran a 21-person study on trust and reversibility to define when AI should act on its own, ask first, or hand off to a person, a framework now shaping how the design team approaches AI-native systems.
  • Define AI-native experience visions for enterprise customers, using prototypes and workflow models to align product, engineering, and leadership before major investment decisions.
  • Co-led the AWS IoT Experience Vision, turning a fragmented portfolio of 18+ services into one intelligent direction that brought Engineering and go-to-market strategies together; leadership approved the direction and allocated product management resources.
  • Led end-to-end UX for the AWS IoT Greengrass V2 platform rebuild, a complete re-architecture shipped with 50+ engineers on a fixed 6-month deadline; the work was demoed at re:Invent by James Gosling (Creator of Java).
  • Created a UX evaluation framework that engineers used in architecture reviews to catch design problems themselves, scaling design quality beyond my own work.
  • Led design for AWS IoT Greengrass Lite as the sole designer across three engineering teams, launching a new lightweight runtime without fragmenting the platform; the onboarding pattern became the platform standard and the product won Best-in-Show at Embedded World 2025.

Hearsay Systems

Senior UX Designer · 2016 – 2020 · San Francisco, CA

Led design for enterprise SaaS across campaign automation, contact management, navigation, and design systems, turning fragmented workflows into scalable customer-facing experiences.

  • Led research and design for Dynamic Campaigns, which hit annual targets in just nine months, with a 9% increase in weekly post publish rate, 98% adoption across 150+ customers, and became a key driver of customer renewals.
  • Led the Unified Contacts initiative, aligning three product teams on a consolidated data model; drove the Navigation Redesign that became the foundation for the company's first Design System.
  • Interim co-lead supporting three designers; ran hiring, onboarding, and company-wide new-hire orientations.

Fluid

Experience Designer · 2013 – 2016 · Oakland, CA

Designed AI-powered shopping assistants and product-customization experiences for enterprise retail clients.

  • Led the "eXpert Personal Shopper," an AI-powered shopping assistant, from concept to MVP for clients including The North Face (IBM Watson integration), launching desktop and mobile in 2016.
  • Designed a product-customization platform for Fortune 500 clients including Fender and Reebok.

Accolo

User Experience Engineer · 2011 – 2013 · Larkspur, CA
  • Revamped a cloud recruiting web application end to end, from usability evaluation and user research to wireframing and prototyping.
AI Experiments

Outside of work, I prototype and build daily with AI: built an iPhone app for my toddler, programmed a hardware game device, built web apps and games.

Tools

Claude Code · Cursor · Amazon Kiro · Figma

Education
University of Southern California · M.S. in Computer Science2011
Xi'an Institute of Post and Telecommunications · B.S. in Computer Science2009