Marcelo Paiva

Talent management platform — applicant tracking, onboarding, performance.

• Moved design handoff from static files to working code. Designers and product managers ship pull requests through the same review gate as engineers, and drift found downstream flows back upstream as a PR against the template.
• Built the design system template repository that designers and product managers now build in: a running application on the real component library and tokens, with mock data, that installs on any machine without the legacy Windows stack.
• Wrote the design rules, accessibility standard and writing guidelines as markdown in the repository, so both people and coding agents read them before anything is generated. The platform conformance target is now answerable from the repo rather than from me.
• Set WCAG 2.2 AA as the target for the new platform and moved accessibility from an end-of-line audit into the components, where keyboard behavior, focus, structure and contrast ship with the starting material.
• Made deskless and mobile the default case: multi-tenant test data modeled on frontline customers — logistics, nursing, food service, higher education — so phone behavior is decided alongside desktop rather than after it.
• Built a proof-of-concept MCP server that lets an AI agent operate the platform through its existing REST API — over 160 typed tools across twelve HR domains, from requisitions to offer letters — with a streaming chat client that sends the model only the tools a message needs. The agent acts with the permissions of the person signed in and no more, and bulk actions are capped by schema.
• Led the team that built the in-product assistant into the template: chats grounded in the record on screen, reachable from every global search result, and question answering over the design system in which the model first picks the relevant reference documents under a structured-output schema, then answers only from them, with citations that link back to the source.
• Led a one-week proof of concept for contextual help, added without touching the product: a Chrome extension and an in-app guide that match the screen to articles by BM25 over a local index, and an agent that walked every screen and wrote the missing articles through an MCP server that can create drafts and has no code path to publish.
• Made erasure a tested property of what the assistant is grounded in. A build gate reads every string a model can be handed — system prompts, the search corpus, generated narratives — and fails if a person who asked to be forgotten appears in any of them.

The Rhonda Weiss Center for Accessible IDEA Data, which AEM leads under a multiyear U.S. Department of Education (OSEP) grant to improve state capacity to publish IDEA data accessibly.

• Led design and development of an accessible reporting system for IDEA Part B and Part C data — what states report on how children with disabilities are served — working with 80 stakeholders including disabled people.
• Extended the U.S. Web Design System with design tokens carrying accessibility decisions, so downstream teams inherited contrast, focus and categorical data palettes rather than re-deciding them.
• Ran 30+ usability studies with disabled participants, including blind and neurodivergent users, reaching the highest applicable conformance level on the delivered tool.
• Made equitable data representation the core design problem, and presented the approach at CSUN and Closing the Gap.

Joined Ultimate Software on the recruiting team; Ultimate and Kronos merged to form UKG, an HCM suite used by 5,000 organizations and 15 million employees.

• Owned experience design across the portfolio — HR, payroll, recruiting, onboarding, performance and workplace culture analytics — and Great Place To Work alongside it.
• Led a team of 10 designers and researchers, and drove accessibility conformance across every product in it.
• Designed the employee belonging and DEI analytics hub, mapping demographic data against sentiment, including hiring funnel analysis by gender and ethnicity.
• Carried the HCM experience through a cross-platform rebrand without losing accessibility ground.
• Sponsored a framework-agnostic design system using Web Components, so one component set could serve micro-frontends written in Angular, Vue and React.

• Built and led a team of 8 designers and developers, shipping a modern front end and a design system component library.

• Introduced Lean UX practice, halving design iteration time and embedding designers inside agile delivery teams.

• Led interaction design for Eikon, Thomson Reuters' financial markets platform, across wearables, smartphones and tablets.