I’m Claire, a software designer and strategic planner. I’ve dipped my toes in many industries and skills with my main constant being my own high bar for building design driven and ethically-sound products in each of my work experiences.

I originally grew up in Houston, the fourth largest city in the US, with a highly medically-focused Argentinian-Jewish family. While studying pre-Med at Stanford and shadowing a few physicians, I found myself much more interested in the efficacy and beauty of their medical devices rather than the practice of talking to, diagnosing, and treating patients. That served as my wake up call to try out some engineering classes. Long story short, I loved them and ended up declaring Mechanical Engineering: Product Design as my major.

Having worked on a range of physical and digital products at Stanford related to the medical field; I decided to explore my ability to move and learn quickly by joining Accenture’s digital consulting practice after college. Fast forward 3 years, 6 industries, and 4 live products later, I felt I had acquired enough skills during my time at Accenture to lead design at a startup. That led me to a 10 person virtual fashion startup called Forma Technologies (recently acquired by Snap) for a brief 6 months until I realized I wanted to work at a medium sized company and have the ability to critique and collaborate with other designers again. I then landed my current position at Silicon Valley Bank where I was designer no. 5 to join our rapidly growing team of almost 45 designers now. I’ve now been at SVB almost 2 years and look forward to continued work building internal and external tools for our Global Fund Banking and Corporate Finance sectors.

In my personal life, I spend most my free time either playing and caring for my Aussie puppy named Gio 🐶, at Austin Bouldering Project (ABP), running, learning about climate change mitigation, painting, and hanging with loved ones! I also love to cook and bake and try new recipes (particularly on a Yotam Ottolenghi kick recently).

I’ve been mentoring via my Stanford, Accenture, and Brown networks both informally and more formally for a couple years. I particularly like working with passionate students and early/mid career employees to guide them to find what fulfills their purpose or ikigai in life and work. Understanding the concept of ikigai (japanese term for “reason for being”) and putting it in practice in my life played a significant role in my early twenties and the concept continues to keep me grounded and navigating my life in the right direction for me.

‍

• Goal-setting & tracking
• Narrowing down a job search
• Interview prep
• Resume and cover letter tips
• Design roles in tech (UX Design vs. UXR vs. Content Strategy vs. Visual design vs. Service design)
• Startup VS fortune 100 pro’s and con’s for designers
• Meeting people authentically instead of your typical “networking”

​

​

• Traveling to new countries and exploring new cultures
• Being a woman in tech
• Advocating for your promotion
• Dealing with burnout
• Finding the ever elusive work life integration & delineation that’s right for you

​

​

• Kind - I’ll listen and meet you where you’re at without judgement
• Intelligent - If you can’t tell, I love learning and nerding out on new fields and philosophies. I also like to help others talk through ideas and asking questions to refine them.
• Attentive - I’ll put away all my other work, social media, and other red dot delivering apps and focus on you.
• Honest - while I’ve been told I’m very kind, I don’t sugarcoat feedback and like to be real and honest with those I develop strong relationships with - be it with a mentee, a friend, or a family member who I want to succeed in all their personal/professional endeavors.