Eli Bakal, product engineer
Designing for the future means leveraging emerging technologies to create experiences that are flexible, inclusive, and delight users at every turn. I blend advanced research-based strategies with scalable design systems and AI-powered personalization so your product can grow and learn alongside its audience. By grounding every decision in empathy and staying curious about what's next, I build resilient, enduring solutions.
kinda done
Projects and lab notes
Binder, a Magic: The Gathering collection and price tracking app
Magic made $1.7 billion in 2025, up 59%. All of it comes from sealed packs. Binder tracks the cards already sitting in people's houses.
FinSight, investment insights through a pair of glasses
FCAT asked how smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas fit into a financial company's ecosystem and gave me a weekend. This is what I built.
e-pi
Six ingestors on a Raspberry Pi turn the yard's birdsong, the meter readings, and the garden into one private dashboard I check every morning.
Privy
An AI legal prep workspace where clients chat with an assistant that cites attorney-shared documents while every turn lands in an audit trail.
Evolving financial searchProtected
Prototyped a conversational search assistant for Fidelity that keeps context across follow-up questions, across three working iterations tested with 12 advisors.
Bridging the gap with content partners
Helping content contributors preview and format copy for AI tools without needing to know code.
Fidelity CLIProtected
A terminal trading surface over Fidelity's APIs, tracking positions, entering orders, and reading market data without leaving the keyboard.
Updating a portfolio should not be archaeology
Every designer I know has a stale portfolio. Testing whether a project can collect its own case-study material while I build it, instead of after.
Air, a particulate monitor from a breadboard up
Environmental science was my first career. I wired a no-solder sensor rig to relearn sensors and built a SwiftUI app around the feed.
Experimenting with the UserTesting API
Turning Git commits into instant usability test plans using the UserTesting.com API.
Docs to Dialogue
Turning everyday notes into AI-generated podcasts for richer async communication.
Designing a shared AI memory framework for UX teams
A Git-backed protocol for shared AI memory and context management in UX teams.