Derek Misler

Front-end engineer, design enthusiast, and accessibility advocate with 15+ years of experience across diverse industries. Currently building AI‑powered developer tools at Docker.


Background

I’m a senior front-end engineer who builds high‑leverage product systems: design‑system‑driven UIs, analytics experiences, and AI‑powered developer tooling. At Docker, I work on agent experiences and Desktop workflows, with a focus on performance, accessibility, and production‑grade delivery.

Highlights

  • Senior engineer at Docker building AI agent experiences and developer tooling that ship inside Docker Desktop.
  • Led Patreon’s migration to Next.js and a modern front‑end platform, reducing LCP by 55% while preserving rollout safety and accessibility.
  • First front‑end engineer and later Staff‑level lead at Transfix, defining web + mobile architecture, shared libraries, and engineering standards.
  • Blend strong design craft (typography, layout, interaction) with 15+ years of engineering to ship inclusive, polished product surfaces reliably.

Education

BFA, Graphic Design


Docker

Senior Software Engineer

  • Led engineering across Docker’s AI platform and Docker Desktop enterprise admin experiences; shipped production-grade systems adopted by internal teams and enterprise customers.
  • Rebuilt a shared Electron-based UI platform (monorepo, CI/CD, design system integration, hot reload, test infrastructure) to accelerate iteration on agent tooling.
  • Delivered secure telemetry pipelines (event schema design, CI validation, dashboards) to improve observability and product decision-making.
  • Strengthened open-source GitHub automation with secret leak prevention, contributor authorization, and prompt-injection mitigations.
  • Took over ownership, unblocked, and shipped Bulk Deployment for Docker Desktop, enabling enterprise IT teams to configure and distribute Docker at scale across platforms.
  • Integrated Docker Hub catalog search/launch into Docker Desktop to reduce workflow friction and improve discoverability.
  • Led front‑end architecture for an enterprise Insights dashboard, referenced in customer adoption and sales enablement outcomes.
  • Raised the quality bar via accessibility, testing, and front-end reviews; partnered with Design, Product, Security, and Data to deliver cross-surface features.

Patreon

Senior Front-End Platform Engineer

  • Senior engineer on the Front‑End Platform team driving a large‑scale migration from a Flask/React multi‑page app and in-house SSR to Next.js.
  • Led the front-end workstream and partnered with backend platform + infrastructure teams, delivering an immediate 55% reduction in LCP (primary KR metric).
  • Designed an incremental migration pattern to move features safely without blocking product delivery, enabling staged rollout and parallel work.
  • Built rollout and reliability guardrails: percentage-based feature flags, alerting/triage workflows, and dashboards to monitor regressions.
  • Drove quality and maintainability upgrades: TypeScript adoption, linting standards, and front‑end documentation practices.
  • Modernized testing from minimal coverage/Enzyme to React Testing Library + Cypress, including running smoke/e2e in dev and on PRs (not only at deploy time).
  • Mentored junior engineers and interns; created and led “Front‑End 101” onboarding for new engineers and served as a high‑volume interviewer.
  • Improved state and form architecture by migrating from Redux to Jotai and building accessible form/validation primitives integrated with the component library (React Hook Form).

Cadre

Lead Engineer

  • Unified decoupled SPA and third-party marketing site into cohesive Django/React app; migrated front‑end to monorepo.
  • Built custom server-rendering with Webpack, React, and Node.js for marketing site.
  • Led internal design system built on Base Web component library (open-source contributor).
  • Mentored full‑stack engineers using Agile and Shape Up methodologies.

Transfix

Staff Front-End/Mobile Engineer

  • First front‑end engineer; established web and mobile architecture, rebuilding Android/iOS apps in React Native.
  • Evolved web stack from Rails → Aurelia → React/Redux; developed internal library for web, mobile, and shared NPM modules.
  • Implemented CI/CD with CircleCI, defined linting/testing standards, and led creation of internal component library.
  • Rebuilt public site from WordPress to Jade templates, later migrating to 11ty.js.

Architecture & Platform

Front-End Architecture, Design Systems, Monorepo Architecture, Platform DX, API Design, Performance Optimization, Scalable UI Patterns

AI & Agent Systems

AI Agent Development, LLM Integration, Agent Orchestration, Prompt Engineering, Agent Security & Guardrails, AI-Powered Developer Tools

Product & UX

UI/UX Design, Responsive Design, Typography & Layout, Accessibility (WCAG), Interaction Design, Design Tokens, Visual Hierarchy

Quality & Delivery

Developer Experience, Testing Strategy, CI/CD Workflows, Observability-Driven Iteration, Production Readiness


Core Stack

TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Electron, Node.js, Web Components

Platform & Infra

Docker, Nx, Monorepos, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, CloudFront, S3, Telemetry Pipelines

AI & Agents

OpenAI API, Claude API, Tool Calling, Agent Workflows, LLM Orchestration, Prompt Engineering, Agent Security

Dev Tooling & Quality

Vite, Webpack, Jest, Vitest, React Testing Library, Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, Chromatic, Biome, ESLint, Prettier

Observability & Ops

Sigma, DataDog, Sentry, Structured Logging, Metrics & Dashboards

Languages & Ecosystem

Go, Python, Remix, Astro, React Native, Redux Toolkit, Jotai

Design

Figma, Tailwind CSS, Adobe Creative Cloud, Base Web, Shadcn/UI