Cassondra
Roberts
Front-end Architect & Design Systems Engineer
Raleigh, NC (remote)
Front-end engineer with 12+ years building scalable web applications & design systems that enable rapid experimentation & growth. W3C CSS Working Group member & open source leader with proven ability to drive adoption, optimize conversion, & collaborate across organizational boundaries. Deep expertise in building infrastructure that empowers teams to ship faster. Passionate about data-driven development, user-focused design, & creating tools that help teams succeed.
Help define CSS standards, focused on styling web components from the outside & on what design-system practitioners need from the platform.
- Invited as one of the working group's web components experts & spokespeople
- Bridge the Web Components Community Group & the CSS Working Group: organize community group issues & advocate them to the working group
- Filed & championed proposals in Selectors Level 4/5 & CSS Shadow Parts: the :visible pseudo-class, partial element selectors, :first-/:last-/:nth-assigned for slotted content, & styling slotted content by slot name
- Contributed to the Selectors Level 4 draft itself, adding browser-support panels to the spec (2026)
- Attend weekly calls & travel to in-person working group sessions to put design-system needs in front of browser engineers directly
- Represented Red Hat (2020–2021) & Adobe (2021–2025) in spec discussions; continue as an independent invited expert
Community group member advancing interoperability & developer experience for web component standards.
- Work with browser engineers & framework authors on shared patterns for component authoring & interoperability
- Bring design-system authoring pain points into platform discussions so the fixes land in browsers rather than in every library
Talks & interviews on web components, CSS architecture & design systems.
- CSS Day 2023, Amsterdam: “Shining light on the Shadow DOM”, on using the Shadow DOM to build better web components
- Craft Across podcast, 2025: Storybook integration for design systems
- Web Components in Space podcast, 2023: how Adobe builds Spectrum on web components
- DrupalCon Seattle 2019: “Unlocking design in a design system with custom properties”
- DrupalCon Seattle 2019, with Penn State: “Make web development fun again, with web components!”
- DrupalCon Nashville 2018: “One of these things is not like the other: identifying patterns in a mock-up”
Teach undergraduate computer science, including CS180 (python) & CS230 (web programming with databases).
- Design & deliver lectures, live-coding demos & labs on HTML, CSS, PHP & SQL for students with prior programming coursework
Consulting practice helping enterprise teams build the front-end infrastructure & design systems that speed up product development.
- Build & maintain open-source developer tooling, including envoy (zero-config .env setup for monorepos), stylelint-header & postcss-licensing, at 20K+ combined monthly npm downloads
- Integrate AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code) into client engagements to raise developer productivity & code quality without sacrificing maintainability
- Publish technical guides on design system architecture, web components & developer experience
Staff Design Engineer, Spectrum Design System
Led front-end architecture & AI integration for Adobe's design system, serving flagship products (Photoshop, Illustrator) used by millions.
- In Spectrum's AI Working Group, wrote Cursor guidelines & built an AI-assisted workflow that turned engineer descriptions into sprint-ready tickets, cutting planning overhead by more than 25%
- Architected Spectrum CSS's modernized build tooling & moved documentation & prototyping to Storybook, cutting technical debt across 84 component packages shipping in Photoshop, Illustrator & other flagship products
- Used AI to standardize an inconsistent Storybook setup across 80+ files, turning a two-version Storybook upgrade into a simple one
- Landed 265 merged pull requests in under 3 years, 3rd-most of Spectrum CSS's 115 contributors, on a library with 1.9M+ combined weekly npm downloads
- Reviewed every component with design & accessibility specialists so it shipped WCAG AA-compliant into products used by millions
- Represented Adobe in the W3C CSS Working Group, attending weekly calls & in-person sessions to press browser engineers on the CSS features Adobe's product teams needed
Senior Web Components Developer, Digital Imaging, Photoshop
Led the Unified Experience Components initiative, building accessible, WCAG AA-compliant web components for Adobe's flagship products while driving cross-team alignment on shared UX patterns.
- Founded Unified Experience Components, a layer of higher-level web components on Spectrum Web Components (a 97-package library with 2.2M+ combined weekly npm downloads) so every Adobe web product team could ship on Spectrum without losing design fidelity
- Wrote React wrappers for Spectrum's web components so React teams could use them
- Set the accessibility bar for the team: every component shipped semantic, WCAG AA-compliant, keyboard-navigable & correct in high-contrast mode, as requirements rather than follow-up tickets
- Defined pattern-building best practices & drove cross-Adobe alignment on consistent UX & component APIs
- Owned DevOps for several enterprise-scale monorepos while embedded with the Spectrum CSS team
Principal Front-end Architect, User Experience Team, Digital Marketing
Led open source community strategy for PatternFly Elements, driving cross-organizational adoption & web component standards engagement.
- Led the PatternFly Elements open-source community as its public face: roadmap, contribution documentation, code review, & stakeholder funding for dedicated developers
- Drove adoption beyond Red Hat, aligning Google, IBM, Fidelity & Penn State on shared web component patterns for enterprise applications
- Engaged the CSS Working Group & web component standards bodies on accessibility & theming for distributed component architectures
- Prioritized the component roadmap from what designers, developers & stakeholders were actually shipping rather than from assumptions
Senior Front-end Architect, Digital Marketing Strategy & Design
Co-founded PatternFly Elements & served as technical lead for the redhat.com pattern library, establishing front-end standards & mentoring a team of developers.
- Co-founded PatternFly Elements, an open-source library of 42 web components built for graceful degradation & distributed theming across Red Hat's web properties; 3rd-most-active of its 67 contributors with 188 merged pull requests
- Led the redhat.com pattern library as technical lead: semantic markup, JSON schemas for CMS consumption, test fixtures & Mocha/Chai visual regression testing
- Owned code review, training & feedback for pattern-system contributors & front-end developers across redhat.com, & organized cross-team training programs
- Presented the team's methods at DrupalCon 2018 & 2019, then folded what came back into the system
- Mentored developers & students on technical & professional skills
Front-end Developer, UX Development Tech Lead
Architected a component-driven design system & established front-end JavaScript standards for the Red Hat web team.
- Architected the web team's first component-driven design system: Twig templates, modular Sass, Grunt tooling & WebdriverIO visual regression testing
- Owned front-end JavaScript for the web team: set & documented coding standards & built a reusable snippet library for modular UI
- Drove early adoption of Drupal's paragraph module as a flexible templating system, writing the schemas, Twig templates & styles behind the admin interface
- Managed the build server end-to-end: debugging, package management & upgrades
- Consulted across Red Hat divisions on front-end UX, mobile-friendly applications & customer engagement
User Experience Web Developer/Designer
Front-end developer & content manager for redhat.com, leading a team migration to git & delivering microsites for products & major events.
- Led design & development of redhat.com's Training & About sections through a full site redesign, in Sass, HTML5 & a Jekyll/Compass toolchain
- Lead developer for Red Hat Summit's Drupal templates, generating logic-driven markup from the Lanyon API feed
- Migrated the web team from CVS to git: wrote the workflow standards, documentation & bash wrappers, & trained the team hands-on
- Ran redhat.com's homepage & microsite ticket queue to tight SLAs, earning multiple service awards
Associate Technical Consultant
Customer-facing technical consultant for SAS analytics software, specializing in database optimization & enterprise analytics implementations.
- Consulted enterprise customers on SAS integration with third-party databases, specializing in SQL optimization & in-database analytics on Teradata & Hadoop
- Served as Oracle database administrator on a large-scale, long-term customer project
- Researched emerging technologies & authored best-practice & training documentation
Associate Development Tester
QA engineer for SAS in-database products, maintaining a large regression suite across enterprise database platforms.
- Wrote & maintained client- & server-side regression tests across 8 enterprise database platforms (Aster, DB2, Greenplum, Netezza, Teradata, Hadoop & Oracle)
- Managed a ~300-test suite for in-database model processing, with bash-driven reporting infrastructure
- Designed PHP web reporting tools backed by a Perl web crawler to surface test status across distributed servers
R&D Technical Student, In-Database Products
Student researcher building automated reporting & testing tooling for the in-database products R&D team.
- Built automated reporting tools for status monitoring across multiple database platforms
- Introduced PHP-based reporting to the group, improving its online tools & documentation
- Developed Linux scripting tools to streamline the team's repetitive tasks & designed training used by international staff
Junior front-end developer in a CakePHP/PHP5 environment.
- Developed & debugged HTML5 & SCSS front-end features in a CakePHP environment
- Configured Linux test & development environments (MySQL, Sphinx, Redis, Mercurial, CoffeeScript, Compass & Couchbase)
Managed online store content & tooling for a specialty sports retailer.
- Researched & implemented new tools for the online store, including JavaScript applets
- Unified the catalog's appearance through structured HTML across every product image & description
- Managed a direct report: training, reviews & personnel matters
Production editor managing scheduling, budgets & cross-departmental coordination for academic journal publication.
- Created & managed budgets up to $605,500 per journal, cutting costs while improving publication quality
- Led regression testing & improvements to the journal management software, mining US & UK offices for what would make it more efficient
- Created & monitored production schedules & turnaround times, consistently meeting tight deadlines
Design systems
- Component architecture & API design
- Web components, Shadow DOM & Lit
- Design token pipelines (Style Dictionary)
- Figma dev mode & token integration
- Technical documentation & contribution models
- Open source community leadership
Accessibility & quality
- WCAG AA compliance
- ARIA & APG patterns
- Keyboard navigation & high-contrast mode
- Semantic HTML & SEO
- Responsive & adaptive UI
- Performance optimization
Languages
- CSS & Sass
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- HTML
- JSON Schema
- Bash
- PHP
- Python
Tooling & infrastructure
- Monorepo build & release tooling
- npm publishing & semantic versioning
- GitHub Actions CI
- PostCSS
- Vite
- Storybook
- Chromatic visual regression
- Playwright
- Cypress
- AI-assisted workflows (Cursor, Claude Code)
Leadership
- Cross-team technical leadership
- Roadmap & stakeholder ownership
- Code review & technical feedback
- Engineering mentorship & teaching
- Pair programming
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Meredith College, 2008 – 2012