Joe Siconolfi

Staff Design Engineer

Cohere · San Francisco Bay

I'm a designer, engineer, and self-proclaimed creative cosmonaut based in San Francisco, originally from New York. With pizza in my blood, punk in my veins, and users in my heart. I've been on the West Coast and the SF Bay since 2022. For 15+ years I've been doing both: conceiving the experience and building it, in the same session, without handing off.

Most of my work has been at companies where the product didn't exist yet. That's where the duality matters most. When you're figuring out what something should be, you can't separate how it feels from how it works. The design is the product. The code is the design. I've never thought of them as different jobs.

My focus now is AI-native product. Not AI as a feature bolted onto something, but experiences built from the ground up around what AI actually makes possible. I care deeply about the human side of that: how do you make a system that learns feel empowering rather than opaque? How do you design for capability without designing away agency? How do you get someone to the moment where the product just gets them, and make that moment happen faster? That's the problem I keep returning to.

When I'm not building I'm digging through record bins or watching the Knicks and Mets find new ways to break my heart. I started with MySpace CSS in middle school and the habit never left. Fifteen years later the tools are different, the problems are bigger, and I still can't stop making things.

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