Derry Birkett

Design Director · London / Barcelona / Remote · ● Open to roles

I'm Derry — I go deep on the hard problems and raise the craft bar.

18 years designing complex products from first principles — enterprise platforms, design systems that scale, and 0→1 builds that hold up over time. I work best where depth matters: untangling information architecture, building research rigour, and setting the quality standards that make the team around me better. I lead through the work. Open to Design Lead, Head of Design, and Director roles.

Hire me into your teamSee my approach

About

18 years. Enterprise, scaleup, agency, 0→1.

I work best where depth matters: untangling information architecture, building research rigour, and setting the quality standards that make the team around me better.

About me →

Years

18

Enterprise, scaleup, startup, agency

Team scale

3 → 9

Design org scale

Range

UK · EU · US

Product, brand, research, AI labs

Currently building

All demos →
Curator icon

agent

Curator

A scheduled read-only agent that scans the codebase overnight and files GitHub issues for dead exports, oversized files, and stale placeholders — without ever touching the code.

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tool

Delta

An autonomous system that installs as a git submodule and delivers a daily pull request via GitHub Actions — AI agents pick what to build, write the spec, and ship the code.

Ledger icon

agent

Ledger

A daily audit agent that checks whether the Delta Suite pipeline did what it was supposed to do overnight — silent on success, opens a ledger/gap GitHub issue when something diverged.

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agent

Merge

A GitHub Actions agent that enforces a 24-hour review window and runs an AI safety check before merging or blocking any PR — part of the MakerSuite trilogy alongside Delta and Council.

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agent

Council

A repository of role-based advisor plugins — CTO, CISO, Developer, Product — installable as a git submodule. Each advisor has explicit scope, playbooks, and escalation rules. Part of the MakerSuite pipeline alongside Delta, Merge, and Ledger.

tool

NVSBL

A three-repo suite: an invisible agent engine discovers product opportunities through autonomous scanning, a public API surface packages approved signal, and an authenticated app layer delivers subscriptions, API keys, usage, and billing.

tool

Bloom

A suite of composable repositories — Idea, Stack, Soul, Shulkerbox — that connects discovery, definition, and delivery for AI-assisted product development without losing governance.

prototype

pip

An overgrown but working governance prototype: mission docs, agent roles, workflow patterns, project graphs, and a publishing surface — built before the architecture was fully understood, then decomposed into Bloom.

article

Bloom: The Meta-System for Compounding Product Development

How I stopped accumulating accidental scaffolding across projects and built a meta-system that makes every product inherit the best decisions from every product before it.

article

Building HomeCloud

A private-cloud field note: turning a fragile Mac mini setup into resilient, monitored, self-hosted infrastructure for AI, development, and media workflows.

Selected work

All cases →

Designed at scale. Led, hired, and shipped.

Four anchor cases show the through-line: organisation design at CloudBees, enterprise systems at Oracle Netsuite, 0→1 product work at Exabyte, and full-stack UX leadership at Telanto.

Current thinking

The work is shifting again.

I write about design systems, UX maturity, and AI-assisted product work, and keep a studio archive of demos and experiments when the idea needs to be felt rather than explained.