Summary
Raquel Breternitz is an award-winning senior designer and strategic design leader with a decade of experience building product design teams, design systems, and accessible user experiences across companies from The New York Times and Shopify to political campaigns and startups. She blends research-driven design thinking with empathetic leadership, having scaled autonomous, multidisciplinary teams and led tech transformations that prioritize inclusion and accessibility. Known for crafting and expanding design systems (including work on Polaris and internal newsroom tooling), she pairs visual craft with product strategy to tackle complex, high-impact problems. Raquel also brings a creative edge—she speaks and writes about comics for design and mindfulness, and has a public persona as an accessibility-obsessed designer and emoji enthusiast. Based in Austin, she moves fluidly between enterprise design and hands-on incubation, often surfacing unexpected connections between narrative, politics, and product.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Strategic Business Thinking, Strategic Business Thinking at Second Wave Dive
Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) Design, Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) Design at The University of Texas at Austin
Founding Design Fellow (ODD1), Founding Design Fellow (ODD1) at On Deck
Portuguese, English, Spanish