Curriculum vitae
Ada Okafor
Senior Frontend Engineer
- ada@adaokafor.ca
- Toronto, Ontario
- adaokafor.ca
Profile
Senior frontend engineer with eight years of experience building design systems, booking flows and real-time dashboards. I work between design and code, and treat accessibility and performance as part of the definition of done.
Experience
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.
Selected projects
2024
Tillage Design System
Tillage · Lead Frontend Engineer, 14 months
One accessible component library to replace four drifting UI kits across a digital bank's mobile web, onboarding and advisor tools. 212 → 38 components in production.
React · TypeScript · Radix UI · Storybook · Style Dictionary · Playwright · Chromatic
2023
Georgian Bay Ferries Booking
Georgian Bay Ferries · Senior Frontend Engineer, 7 months
A rebuilt ticketing flow for a seasonal ferry operator, designed for patchy dockside signal and a summer rush of day-trippers. 41% → 63% mobile checkout completion.
Next.js · TypeScript · GraphQL · Stripe · Playwright · Lighthouse CI
2022
Kestrel Grid Console
Kestrel Grid · Senior Frontend Engineer, 10 months
A real-time monitoring console for an electricity distributor, rendering millions of telemetry points without freezing the control room. 1.8M points per chart at 60 fps.
React · TypeScript · D3 · Canvas 2D · Web Workers · WebSockets · Vitest
2019
Paperplane Collaborative Editor
Paperplane · Frontend Engineer, 12 months
The real-time editor behind a document tool for small teams, rebuilt so that nobody ever loses a sentence. −92% lost-edit support tickets.
TypeScript · TipTap · Yjs · WebSockets · IndexedDB · Jest
Skills
- 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
Talks and writing
March 2024
Tokens are a contract, not a colour list
Talk · Frontend North, Toronto · 30 minutes
November 2023
Freezing the list: calm interfaces for noisy data
Article · Fieldwork Studio Journal
May 2023
Designing for one bar of signal
Talk · Toronto Web Performance Meetup · 20 minutes
Education
2013 — 2017
BSc Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Human-computer interaction stream; capstone on keyboard-first interfaces.