Fernando Smith
Principal Design Engineer at Soffi
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolFernando Smith is a Principal Design Engineer with 11 years of experience crafting immersive, hand-built experiences that fuse industrial design, storytelling, and cutting-edge ML/AI applied to XR and UX. Trained at RISD with further coursework at MIT and Brown, he operates at the intersection of design and engineering—prototyping fast, validating technically, and shipping polished production installations. He has led creative-technical teams on high-profile cultural and enterprise projects, architected experience orchestration stacks (Node.js + embedded hardware + real-time graphics), and integrated local LLM-driven voice and text-to-image workflows for interactive exhibits. Known for setting pragmatic design systems and dev practices in small teams, he balances hands-on construction with strategic product direction. An unexpected throughline in his work is a near-obsessive attention to jigs—whether physical, digital, or social—which he treats as the foundational discipline that makes complex experiences repeatable and habit-forming.
11 years of coding experience
Coursework in Product Design and Development, Coursework in Product Design and Development at Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyCoursework in Enviromental Studies, Coursework in Enviromental Studies at Brown UniversityBachelor's degree, Industrial and Product Design, Bachelor's degree, Industrial and Product Design at Rhode Island School of Design
en, Spanish, Dutch
Stackoverflow
389reputation
163kreached
6answers
5questions
Github Skills (56)
html5-canvas10
expressjs10
backend10
scripting9
vector-graphics9
nodejs9
webserver8
mongodb8
javascript8
npm7
react7
database7
html6
optimization6
vim6
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
fdiazsmith/env_tools
Feb 2019 - Feb 2026
Contributions:15 pushes, 1 branch in 7 years 1 month
fdiazsmith/RPI_Dont_Panic
Feb 2019 - Jun 2025
Simple to use documentation
Contributions:1 PR, 24 pushes, 1 branch in 6 years 5 months
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