Making career paths accessible to anyone with ambition and a laptop.

Mondai started with a personal conviction. The founder's parents were immigrants. He watched them navigate a system that judged credentials over capability, where getting in the door mattered more than what you could do once you were inside. Mondai was his answer: an AI-powered platform where anyone can learn, build a portfolio of real projects, and connect directly with companies, no traditional interview required.

The vision is bigger than what exists today. The long-term goal is a world where you send a company a video about why you love what they do, and you get matched based on your work, not your resume. Right now, we have built the first layer: a personalized, AI-driven learning system where anyone can start exploring career paths and building real skills.

When I joined, the team was structured unlike any I had worked on before. Three core pods, all designers: a research team, a mobile team, and a web team. I was on the web team.

The product already had a visual direction when I arrived. Brutalist. Dark backgrounds, neon green accents, bold mono typography, generous whitespace. The aesthetic was set. My job was not to reinvent the look. It was to own specific features, make them excellent, and ship them on a part-time cadence.

That last part mattered more than I expected. Part-time design is a different discipline. You cannot rely on being in every meeting or catching every Slack thread. You have to be efficient, decisive, and comfortable with gaps. Sometimes I was deep in the work for weeks. Sometimes I stepped back entirely. The rhythm was inconsistent, and I had to learn to be useful anyway.

When I joined, the team had a library of mobile-first concepts. Screens, flows, components, all designed for phones. But nobody had validated whether mobile was actually where students wanted to learn.

I led an initiative to look at user behavior. The findings were clear: for the deep, focused work that Mondai required, students preferred web sessions over mobile. This was not casual browsing. This was career exploration, AI-guided pathways, long-form content. That kind of attention lives on a laptop, not a phone.

I surfaced the data. The team made the call together: pivot to a web-based MVP. Focus resources on the platform that matched how students actually used the product.

Then we had to actually do it. I was part of the migration, converting existing mobile designs into responsive web layouts with full feature parity across six core product areas. Every screen had to work on the new surface without losing what made the mobile versions good.

The pivot was not dramatic. It was a quiet, research-backed decision that saved the team from building the right product on the wrong platform.

The brutalist aesthetic was already in place when I joined. Dark backgrounds, neon green, bold type, raw edges. It looked striking. The question was whether it could also be inclusive.

Every week, I met with our dedicated Accessibility Designer to review every new component and flow. We did not just check WCAG boxes. We redesigned based on what we found. This was especially critical for the Resources and Action Items sections, where long-form information had to be digestible for users with diverse needs.

Color contrast against dark backgrounds. Focus states on neon-accented elements. Screen reader behavior for the brutalist layout. Touch targets inside the dense terminal-style UI. Each one was a design problem that did not have an obvious answer inside the existing aesthetic.

The process transformed the design system from a visual library into a robust, compliant framework. Brutalist on the outside. Accessible underneath.

Part-time design sounds simple until you try it. You miss context. You rejoin meetings where decisions were made without you. You have to trust that the work you shipped last week is still intact, and sometimes it is not.

What I learned on Mondai is that part-time does not mean partial. It means you have to be more intentional with every hour. You cannot afford to explore three directions when you only have time for one. You have to arrive with a point of view, defend it clearly, and ship it before the window closes.

That constraint made me a better designer. Not because it was comfortable, but because it forced me to separate what mattered from what was just interesting.

Mondai launches at NYC Tech Week 2026. I will be watching from a different city by then, but the onboarding animation, the notification system, the career modal, the resources screen, those will be in the room. That is enough.