Resume of Brad Azevedo

In 2022, I hit a wall. The accumulation of an extended, stressful period at work left me running on empty. It was time to do something I had never done in a meaningful way: take a break. I had a birthday coming up, so I decided to take some time off with the intention of celebrating my 40th and doing something indulgent — like learning to surf — but it turned into much more.

It occurred to me on a bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles that I could use this time to pursue a lifelong dream: learning to fly. This was the perfect opportunity to clear my mind and pursue a passion.

Earning a pilot certificate is no small feat; it’s difficult, requires a lot of focus, and is incredibly time-consuming. Before I knew it, six months had passed and the aviation bug had really set in. Why not pursue my instrument rating as well? And so it goes in aviation: one certificate inexorably leads to another, driven by the common trait among pilots to continually improve and expand our skill sets. I’ve now completed my ground instructor certificates and am in pursuit of my commercial certificate.

As time went on, so did life — some good, some bad. I suffered the loss of my two dogs, but I found new love and life in the form of an amazing partner and a new dog. I hiked the Dolomites, went diving in the Great Barrier Reef, flew myself to Portland, and ate lobster in Maine. Life was starting anew.

Taking time off meant I could stop reacting to my life and start actually looking at it. I did a lot of digging to evaluate where I’ve been, what matters to me, and where I want to go. To some degree, I said goodbye to an old life during this period and opened the door to a new one, with clearer direction. I love my new life and feel grateful for it every day. As the dust settled and I felt stable again, I knew it was time to get back to work.

I returned to the wild world of the web in 2025, playing with the new toys that have popped up over the past few years. I was inspired by the new tech and what people were doing with it. Pushing pixels has always been a fun challenge for me because it was like solving a puzzle with a limited toolset. That toolset has expanded significantly over the years, making UI development far more enjoyable. I began building personal projects — including this one — to put those skills to the test. I’ve experimented with AI-assisted development and, to borrow a metaphor from aviation, I’ve landed on using it as my copilot, not my autopilot.

It’s nice to be back at it with a clear mind and inspired by the craft. I’m returning with a refreshed stack, a lot of hard-won perspective, and, frankly, more energy than I had when I left. It’s time to roll up my sleeves and get dirty.

Gusto is an HR platform for small businesses, providing payroll tools, HR management, time tracking, and a platform to sell health benefits and retirement plans.

I joined Gusto as the founding engineer for a brand-new Design Systems team and the first dedicated front-end engineer in an otherwise full-stack engineering culture. The immediate mandate was a company-wide rebrand across a codebase that had grown organically for years, relying on a Bootstrap-style CSS utility class library that had led to widespread UI fragmentation. Much of our early effort went into reining in disparate UIs, clearing out deprecated CSS, and aligning design assets across the board.

As the team grew, we began building Workbench from scratch: a full design system written in React and TypeScript encompassing foundational brand assets, components, patterns, and an SVG illustration & icon library — packaged as an internal NPM module, versioned with semantic versioning, tested with Jest and RTL, and deployed via Buildkite. I eventually took ownership of the documentation site, which went well beyond our primitive Storybook integration to provide proper editorial documentation for each component: usage examples, accessibility notes, and testing guidance. I did the vast majority of the technical writing, designed much of the page-level layout, and built the site itself using Gatsby, React, CSS Modules, and TypeScript. I also wrote the Design Systems Newsletter to keep the broader organization informed.

At its peak, the team was about eight people supporting roughly 500 employees across engineering and design.

Jawbone changed its name to Jawbone Health when the company shifted focus from audio products to activity trackers, but it was, for all intents and purposes, the same company and team as before.

The company was developing wearable bands capable of tracking various metrics, from heart rate to steps to sleep. The engineering team was building out the dashboard infrastructure to display and manage all this data, and I was one of two engineers building the front end. We built prototypes using Gatsby and custom implementations of React via Webpack. We leveraged the latest features of ES6, used Styled Components for styling, and used Redux for state management.

Sadly, the market for such devices was saturated and finances became an issue, so the products were never fully realized.

Jawbone earned its reputation as an innovator in the Bluetooth space, beginning with some of the first Bluetooth headsets on the market and eventually launching the popular Jambox portable Bluetooth speaker. The company’s final act was a move into the wearable space with an activity tracker called UP.

I began as one of three front-end engineers building various aspects of the website, from marketing and support pages to e-commerce. I eventually came to own most of the marketing pages because I enjoyed the challenge of building user interfaces.

I spearheaded the move to responsive design and learned a ton about web fonts, image optimization, SEO, and building flexible, performant, mobile-first UIs. Over time, I realized that we were reinventing the wheel far more than necessary, so I began identifying common patterns and proposing new ones to the design team that would promote consistent UIs across browsers and devices (remember: this was an era of severe device fragmentation). This was my entry into what we now call “design systems.”

As a product-based company, it was important to structure pages with strong semantic meaning and metadata — not just for humans, but for the bots that aid with product discovery (e.g., Googlebot, Twitter, and Facebook). SEO was just becoming a focus in the industry, so I led the project to ensure SEO standards were met. We also ran experiments with Optimizely to test effectiveness.

CBS Interactive was my first job out of college. Prior to being acquired by CBS, the company was known as CNET. I worked in the “entertainment” division, whose brands included GameSpot, TV.com, GameFAQs, Metacritic, and eventually Giant Bomb.

My role began with entry-level production work publishing content produced by the editorial team. Over time, my role matured into general front-end work across all properties. Each site featured an enormous amount of written content, photos, and video, so I gained extensive experience building templates fed by a CMS.

At the time, the stack was based on PHP using Zend templating and MooTools for JavaScript. This was the era of IE6 as well as the release of Firefox and Firebug. Firebug would forever change the way we developed the front end.

I worked with a back-end engineer to develop the entertainment division’s first mobile site for GameSpot. This was the “m-dot” era — before Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive design” — when mobile development was still in its infancy. It was built using PHP, Zend, jQuery, and Mustache.js.