Berlin, Germany

Ivan Banov

Staff Frontend Engineer — Design Systems & Frontend Architecture

TypeScript · Style Engines · DX Tooling · Performance · A11y · Technical Leadership

I build the systems other engineers build on. Over 15+ years I've turned fragmented UI into coherent, high-performance design systems and frontend platforms, working where design intent, render, and developer experience meet.

ivanbanov@gmail.com +49 1520 8133683 /in/ivanbanov
00

Building

2026 — PresentOpen source

dunky.dev 🫏

DX tools that unlock powerful UIs

A framework-agnostic foundation for design systems that solves the wiring problem: behavior and styles scattered across framework-specific code, forcing costly rewrites per platform.

  • State Machine. Framework-agnostic behavior, described once. Available.
  • Style Engine. Portable style schemas, resolved for performance. Coming soon.
  • Components. Agnostic render layer over behavior and styles. Coming soon.

Read — Dunky: The Journey ↗ dunky.dev ↗ GitHub ↗

01

Experience

Oct 2021 — PresentBerlin

Tech Lead — Design System

Miro · Design System Team

I lead the architecture and evolution of Miro's design system, the shared UI foundation behind web, native and canvas.

  • Empower Styles — zero-runtime styling engine. Designed and built the design system's styling library spanning Miro's React and canvas surfaces. A full build-time style extractor compiles authored styles to static CSS, removing runtime cost and meeting the performance budget of the canvas's hottest paths.
  • Cross-surface architecture. Aligned the styling architecture across the performance team, the canvas engine team (WASM), and Surface — Miro's in-house JSX-like renderer originating from InVision — so one system serves both DOM and canvas rendering without trade-offs.
  • AI-ready design system. Drove the move to an AI-ready pipeline where a single source flows Figma → code, feeding the DS MCP server, documentation site, and published packages from one source of truth — keeping tokens, docs, and components continuously in sync.
  • Architecture & platform migration. Architected a scalable, versioned system and led its migrations — introducing Stitches, then steering the move to PandaCSS after Stitches' deprecation to protect long-term maintainability.
  • Footprint reduction & governance. Formed and led a cross-team initiative targeting an ~83% cut in Miro's CSS footprint, handing the design system full styling control of the app — enforced with guardrails that block ad-hoc overrides and keep the UI consistent everywhere.
  • Automation. Built visual-regression automation to catch UI drift before release, and automated the icon pipeline end-to-end from Figma to code.
Aug 2019 — Oct 2021Berlin

Staff Software Engineer

Cobalt.io · Frontend Chapter Lead

Led the frontend chapter across four teams, setting technical direction from data fetching through to UI rendering for Cobalt's pentest-as-a-service platform.

  • Modular design system. Built and scaled a modular design system that let four teams ship consistent UI independently and in parallel.
  • Ownership model. Defined ownership boundaries and interfaces between frontend teams, removing overlap and unblocking parallel delivery.
  • Visual-regression testing. Introduced a Jest + Puppeteer pipeline for automated UI validation, cutting regressions reaching production.
  • Design-system-driven PDF. Architected a PDF-generation service via API that reused the design system, keeping print and web visually coherent from a single source.
Jan 2019 — Jul 2019Berlin

Senior Software Engineer

Sauce Labs

Owned the frontend integration between Sauce Labs' real-device cloud and the testing services from the acquired TestObject.

  • Real-device cloud migration. Helped migrate legacy real-device-cloud infrastructure to a modern, scalable platform.
  • Integration architecture. Drove frontend optimizations that smoothed the integration between devices and testing environments.
Jun 2017 — Dec 2018Berlin

Senior Frontend Engineer

Getsurance

Built Getsurance's frontend from the ground up in Elm — a type-safe, crash-free foundation for a regulated insurance product — and the automation around it.

  • Component library from scratch. Created a fully reusable UI component system that let the team ship new features with minimal effort.
  • SDK automation & state layer. Designed an SDK-automation process from Swagger definitions and built the state layer that synchronized microservice data with the frontend — streamlining API consumption and maintainability.
  • Email infrastructure. Developed a responsive transactional-email system (Inky & Panini) for consistent branding across communications.
  • Headless CMS. Integrated a static-site generator with a headless CMS for efficient content management.

Earlier

Across Loggi, Creditas, Dafiti, UOL, and Think4 (2010–2017, São Paulo → Berlin), I grew from building brand storefronts and high-conversion checkouts into shared component libraries and app architecture — React, Redux, Ember.js, and React Native — standardizing frontend practices and shipping the products and internal systems that scaled each company.

Senior Frontend Engineer · Loggi, São Paulo
Jun 2016 — May 2017
  • Scaled Loggi's frontend infrastructure across multiple repositories during hypergrowth.
  • Built shared React + Redux libraries that made UI reusable across teams.
  • Shipped mobile apps in React Native, extending Loggi's reach to new surfaces.
Senior Frontend Engineer · Creditas, São Paulo
Jun 2014 — May 2016
  • Delivered and maintained multiple production web apps in Ember.js.
  • Designed and launched Creditas' first internal middle-office system, optimizing loan-processing workflows.
Frontend Engineer · Dafiti, São Paulo
Jun 2013 — May 2014
  • Owned the checkout experience for one of Latin America's largest fashion retailers, optimizing for performance and conversion.
  • Refactored legacy scripts and optimized assets to minimize load time.
  • Built a Gulp automation pipeline that cut build times and streamlined deploys.
Frontend Engineer · UOL, São Paulo
Feb 2012 — Feb 2013
  • Contributed to standardizing frontend practices across one of Brazil's largest web portals.
  • Led efforts to unify design and code standards across projects.
  • Built and maintained reusable modules and frontend libraries.
Frontend Engineer · Think4, São Paulo
Feb 2010 — Jan 2012
  • Delivered frontend for high-profile brand campaigns and storefronts.
  • Built store-within-a-store pages for clients like Nike and Red Bull.
  • Partnered closely with designers to validate layouts before development.
02

Expertise

Architecture & Leadership

Design systems Frontend architecture Technical leadership Cross-team alignment Platform migrations API & contract design

Performance

CSS optimization Build-time extraction Visual regression

Languages & Frameworks

TypeScript JavaScript Elm React React Native Redux CSS

Systems & Tooling

Style Engines Design tokens MCP / AI-ready docs Icon pipelines Component libraries
03

Speaking

Making Sense of CSS-in-JS
Why the ecosystem reached for it, how it actually works under the hood, and the runtime vs. zero-runtime trade-offs — a practical playbook for doing it right
Jun 2024
Packing a Design System↗
On architecting and shipping a design system at scale
May 2024
XSS — What It Is & How Attacks Work↗
A practical look at cross-site scripting
Mar 2017
Styleguide Concepts↗
From styleguide to a framework in code
Jul 2016

Education

FIAP — São Paulo
Internet Systems, Associate Degree · 2015–2016

Languages

🇧🇷 Portuguese 🇪🇸 Spanish 🇬🇧 English

Let's build the foundation your product ships on.

Get in touch
Ivan Banov · Berlin · ivanbanov@gmail.com