Colin Williams

Colin Williams

Software Engineer / Team Lead

I'm a senior front-end engineer with 15 years of experience building complex, stateful interfaces — the kind where the right abstraction unlocks everything and the wrong one quietly buries you. I specialize in turning ambiguous product goals into systems that feel simple to use but are deeply considered underneath.

At Adidas, I built interactive launches for Kanye West and Beyoncé — managing compressed timelines, outsized expectations, and even larger egos. At AKQA, I helped build Nike.com, led a team delivering a complex hotel room booking system for Palms Casino, and jumped in to rescue a US Soccer project that was off the rails.

At Primer.ai, I built AI-powered analysis tools for their most critical client — work that directly contributed to a $5M contract renewal. At Opto Investments, I automated a 10-minute manual workflow down to seconds using LLM-powered PDF extraction.

Now I lead front-end engineering at HILOS, where we convert 2D footwear designs into 3D-printable models. I inherited a bloated Next.js app with a 10-step CAD pipeline that took 15 minutes to run. Rather than keep patching something fundamentally broken, I owned the decision to rewrite — moving to a monorepo with a Python backend and Vite frontend. That pragmatic rethink turned that 10-step process into a single call with a 90-second response.

Curiosity is how I build. It's also how I help.

This fall, I'm beginning graduate studies in Professional Mental Health Counseling at Lewis & Clark College. I've spent 15 years learning how systems work. Now I'm studying how people work — and I'm doing both at the same time.

The best engineering I've done has always been rooted in understanding people: what they need, what they're afraid of, what they're not saying in the meeting. Counseling training sharpens that instinct and makes it deliberate.

I got here through Trauma Intervention Program, where I volunteer alongside first responders providing emotional first aid during crisis — fires, accidents, sudden loss. Sitting with someone on the worst day of their life teaches you to listen differently. I bring that into every standup, every code review, every hard conversation about scope.