Summary
Maya Gao is a designer with 11 years of experience shaping developer-facing products and design systems across startups and developer platforms in San Francisco. She’s been an early design hire multiple times—helping build Mapbox Studio, Retool’s editor and components API, and prototyping tools at Stripe—bringing a pragmatic focus to complex product-first problems. More recently she led staff-level design work on customization, knowledge surfaces, and code review at GitHub and explored AI interaction patterns and metered compute in the IDE at Replit. Currently at Cursor she wears many hats, blending product design, systems thinking, and hands-on execution. Trained in philosophy and journalism, she pairs rigorous critical thinking with a curious, experimental approach to making and learning. Colleagues describe her wryly as a “professional pretender” and a copy-paste specialist—an unconventional sign of someone who ships quickly and iterates boldly.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Philosophy at Tongji University
Master of Arts (M.A.) Journalism, Master of Arts (M.A.) Journalism at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University