Sam Summer

I led product and design for an AI platform that helps people find jobs they love. Hiring is a beehive right now: companies screen on arbitrary criteria, recruiters are absurdly overworked, and jobseekers feel like they’re dropping résumés into black holes.

Upwage builds first-touch screeners that guide candidates through warm, thoughtful conversations designed to help both parties measure fit. I joined Upwage full-time after consulting with the team for over a year and helped drive growth from $120K to over $2.3M ARR. To date, we’ve interviewed over 500K candidates and earned above a 9.0 NPS (which is pretty unheard of for a recruiting tool).

Foundation was my beloved boutique (read: small) design studio, usually consisting of me plus three or four extremely talented designers and engineers. Our clients were an eclectic bunch, including Fortune 500s, pre-revenue garage projects, venture capital funds, and even a local library. We carved out a niche with roughly Series A to Series C deep tech startups, but some of our most memorable projects were with a matcha retailer, a vanlife company, and ranch that was obsessed with making the softest wool.

Along the way, the studio was recognized as a DesignRush Top Web Development Company four years running, partnered with Techstars and Open Core Ventures, and helped our clients raise over $250M.

The theme of my stint building software for University of Washington’s research department was wrangling big, complex products that often featured tech stacks that looked like a fossil record cross section.

My biggest projects were creating the core design system used across the research org and leading the rebuild of a budget tool that manages $1.77B in annual funding (a 30-year engineering veteran called this “the most ungodly complicated piece of software” he’d ever seen. My tenure also coincided with the pandemic, so part of my job was setting new standards for browser and device support to help with the transition remote work.

Wisr was an edtech company building forums that colleges used for peer advising, career support, alumni networks, and remote classes. We were a small team with a fast-spreading product, so I wore many hats. Aside from leading design as we landed our first 40 clients, I interviewed users, managed the marketing site, and often wrote front-end code.
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Wisr was acquired by EAB in early 2021 after the pandemic pushed most colleges to go fully online.

Sponsored projects with Airtable and the National Park Service; 3.99 GPA

John & Beatrice Wesley Memorial Prize in Design; magna cum laude