Senior Frontend Engineer · Toronto, Ontario
Ada Okafor designs and builds interfaces that hold up.
I'm a frontend engineer who works between design and code: design systems, performance and accessibility for products people rely on every day. Previously at Fieldwork Studio and Paperplane, now at Tillage.
CurrentlyLeading the design system at Tillage, writing up a field guide to CSS container queries, and open to one new engagement from October.
- 8 yrs
- shipping production interfaces
- 3
- design systems taken to production
- AA
- accessibility is the floor, not the goal
01 / Selected work
Four projects, four lessons.
02 / Experience
Eight years, three teams.
2023 — Present
Senior Frontend Engineer, Design Systems
Tillage · Toronto · Hybrid
- Lead a four-person platform squad that owns the component library used by 11 product teams.
- Cut open accessibility defects from 61 to 4 and introduced keyboard and screen-reader test gates.
- Run a fortnightly design-and-engineering critique that has replaced most handoff documents.
2020 — 2023
Senior Frontend Engineer
Fieldwork Studio · Toronto · On-site and client visits
- Delivered the Georgian Bay Ferries booking flow and the Kestrel Grid console as the lead frontend engineer.
- Set the studio's performance budgets and wired Lighthouse CI into every client repository.
- Mentored three junior engineers, two of whom were promoted within 18 months.
2017 — 2020
Frontend Engineer
Paperplane · Waterloo, ON · Remote
- Rebuilt the collaborative editor on Yjs and TipTap, retiring the snapshot-sync architecture.
- Built the first shared component library and the team's Storybook from nothing.
- Joined the on-call rota and wrote the runbook that halved incident response time.
03 / Skills
The toolbox, grouped.
Build
- TypeScript
- React and Next.js
- Modern CSS (container queries, layers)
- GraphQL
- Node.js
Design and systems
- Design tokens
- Storybook and component APIs
- Figma variables and prototyping
- Motion design
- Information architecture
Quality and speed
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)
- Core Web Vitals and profiling
- Playwright and Vitest
- Bundle budgets in CI
- Screen-reader testing
Working together
- Pairing with designers
- RFCs and decision records
- Mentoring
- Workshop facilitation
- Calm code review
04 / Writing and talks
On the record, in public.
Tokens are a contract, not a colour list
Frontend North, Toronto · 30 minutes
How Tillage moved 212 components onto one token source, and the three rules that stopped eleven teams from forking it again.
Ask for the slidesFreezing the list: calm interfaces for noisy data
Fieldwork Studio Journal
What a control room taught us about alert lists that move under the cursor, with the virtualisation and queueing pattern we shipped.
Ask for a copyDesigning for one bar of signal
Toronto Web Performance Meetup · 20 minutes
Throttled-network testing, JavaScript budgets in CI and idempotent payments, drawn from a summer on the Georgian Bay ferry docks.
Ask for the slides
05 / Contact
Let's make something precise.
I take on one engagement at a time: design system builds and reviews, performance rescues and frontend leadership. A short note about the problem is the best start.
- Based in
- Toronto, Ontario, working remote or on-site across the GTA
- Availability
- One engagement from October, three days a week or full-time
- Replies
- Within two working days, Monday to Thursday, 9 to 5 ET