About
Eric Fillingame
Designer and builder.
I'm a product designer in Los Angeles. For thirteen years I've built the systems underneath products people use daily, most recently at Calm, where I designed Calm Sleep from zero to a global iOS launch in four months.
I design systems that behave, not just interfaces that display. Calm Sleep's hardest problem wasn't the screens, it was trust: users wouldn't engage with a personalized plan they couldn't understand. We earned legibility first, then trust, then intelligence. That sequence is the thing I'd carry into any product built on a model.
On my own iOS app, Growl, I designed the AI pipeline around how it fails. Every image and narration is generated ahead of time through prompts that describe only what belongs in frame, with an approval gate before anything is produced, holding a 2.1% defect rate across hundreds of generations. The interesting design work was in the behavior: what the system optimizes for, when it should stay quiet, and how a mistake stays cheap.
I build what I design. Growl was built in SwiftUI with Claude Code writing every line under my direction, from a single Figma source of truth with zero drift between design and code. That means I can prototype with real model output instead of a mockup of it, which is the only honest way to design something nondeterministic.
Before Calm, five years at Experian designing credit and subscription products for millions of members.
I'm looking for a staff or lead role designing AI products where behavior, trust, and evaluation are the actual design problems.
Where I’ve worked
- Visit Site: Zovie Software (opens in a new tab)
Zovie SoftwareFounder, Design EngineerCurrent - Visit Site: Calm (opens in a new tab)
CalmSr. Product Designer, AI & Personalization & Design Systems2025–2026 - Visit Site: Experian (opens in a new tab)
ExperianSenior Product Designer2020–2025 - Visit Site: Stance (opens in a new tab)
StanceSenior Innovation Designer2013–2019
My Child Elmo
My dog, and the reason the kitchen floor is always actually clean.
Happiest with Family
Lake Toya, Japan
Hokkaido Nightly Fireworks
Fushimi Inari
Ten thousand gates, one at a time. Worth the climb.
Tokyo
I travel to eat and surf. Most of Growl's recipes started as something I ate somewhere and wanted to cook at home.
Stance, years ago
A photo of a photo, from my first design job. The work has changed. The habit of building the thing myself hasn't.
Searching for Waterfalls
Somewhere on Maui purposely lost.
I’m in Los Angeles, open to remote, and I’ll consider relocating for the right role.
What I’m looking for in a role
A staff or lead role where designing and building in one loop is an advantage, not an oddity. I prototype against real behavior and ship in code, which only pays off on teams that sit close together and trust a system to hold the details.
There isn’t one source of truth anymore. There’s Figma, the tokens, the code, and the rules an AI builds from. My job is making them converge, so what comes back is already part of the system instead of something to reconcile. That’s why I want leadership that understands a design system is worth more now, not less: when anything can be generated in seconds, the system is what keeps the output coherent and worth shipping.
AI products interest me, but the domain matters less to me than working with people who care as much about how a thing is built as how it looks.
Get in touch
Open to new work, and always up for a conversation about product, design systems, or shipping design straight through to code.
Site designed and built by Eric Fillingame