Richard Hess

Principal Architect, UI/UX · AI-native & spec-driven UI platforms

Spokane, WA · Remote · eswat2@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/eswat · github.com/eswat2 · eswat2.github.io · npx eswat2

Summary

Principal Architect, UI/UX, with 40+ years building inspectable interfaces and platforms — from expert systems on Xerox Lisp Machines (1985) through SGI and Netscape to MCP-orchestrated, YAML-driven UIs. Designs action–state contracts so agents and humans drive the same runtime without DOM scraping. Bias toward deterministic systems after the first commercial AI wave and its collapse. Currently Principal Architect, UI/UX at Shield Legal LLC (legal tech); previously Principal Architect, Portfolio UI/UX at Cox Automotive (2019–2026), culminating in the YAML/MCP platform work.

Skills

UI & architecture · Spec-driven UI · action–state · web components (Lit, Stencil) · React · Next.js · Vue · design systems · event bus · Tailwind · TypeScript/JavaScript · SVG · micro frontends · portfolio standards

AI-native UI · MCP servers (FastMCP) · LLM tool integration · deterministic agent–UI contracts · YAML as source of truth · dual MCP + REST surfaces

Leadership & tooling · Mentoring · ADR authorship · remote technical leadership · Node · Python · GraphQL · REST · FastAPI · Docker · documentation · PoCs

Experience

Principal Architect, UI/UX — Shield Legal LLC · Remote

March 2026 – Present

• Authored the ADR for an AI-native UI stack: Next.js, React, shadcn/ui, Tailwind CSS, Zustand (+ persist), MCP tooling, and the action–state pattern.
• Shipped the MVP UI directly from that ADR as an executable spec — handed to a coding agent as markdown and implemented against it with no drift from the specification; the Next.js BFF serves a Postgres database.
• Took an AI-generated engineering dashboard from a bare repo to a deployed dev environment in under a day — Terraform-managed dev and prod environments, plus the project's initial test suite.
• Mentoring the team on AI-integrated UI — agents driving interfaces through declared contracts, not merely AI-assisted coding — grounded in independent action–state validation across four multi-framework reference apps.

Principal Architect, Portfolio UI/UX — Cox Automotive · Remote

July 2019 – March 2026

Progression: Principal (Mar 2024–Mar 2026) · Senior Lead Architect (Feb 2023–Mar 2024) · Portfolio Technical Architect, IMS (Sep 2020–Feb 2023) · Lead UI Engineer/Architect (Jul 2019–Sep 2020)

• Designed a YAML → reactive UI platform: single-spec source of truth for LLMs and developers; live previews and framework-specific web component export.
• Architected a custom MCP host (FastMCP) and five dual-protocol MCP servers (Juris runtime, Tailwind, SVG icons, Lit export, Stencil export) so agents and browsers share tools/resources without DOM control.
• Built Juris as the reactive core (17-component registry) with event-bus action–state models and an 18,978-icon / 9-family SVG system (family::name:variant).
• Defined portfolio-wide UI, web component, and design-system standards; drove Lit/Stencil micro-frontend reuse across multi-stack products; earlier Cox roles shipped components that became portfolio standards.

Principal UI Engineer — Skava · Remote

June 2018 – April 2019

• Built the next-gen e-commerce UI framework: SVG Material Design icon component; reference-store refactor; Markdown docs and training for SI and in-house teams.

Senior UI Software Engineer — Demandbase · Remote

July 2007 – January 2018

• Owned enterprise SaaS UI for 10+ years as the stack evolved through Adobe Flex/AIR, AngularJS, and React/Redux.
• Built a custom SVG information funnel and desktop AIR ticker (CTO-sponsored skunk-works); prototyped rapidly against Node mock APIs to validate design and technology directions.

Senior UI Software Engineer — Sapias

April 2004 – July 2007

• Shipped a Flex vehicle-tracking RIA with custom map rendering before Google Maps was widely available; partnered with design on dashboards and dials.

Foundations — systems & platform UI

1985 – 2004 · Teknowledge · Measurex · Consilium · Xaos · Taligent · Netscape · SGI

• SGI: Maintained ViewKit; ported Quake 3 Arena to IRIX under NDA with id Software — official binaries ran in SGI's wall demo room; owned official Netscape for IRIX release builds.
• Netscape (XFE): Communicator 4.x; invented and defended HTML signatures in Messenger; Firefox about:credits.
• Taligent, Xaos Tools & Measurex: Deep systems-level OO UI (Taligent, Apple/IBM); UI lead for creative imaging software (Xaos Tools); early industrial process-automation UI (Measurex).
• Consilium: Hired and led a UI team of three, then staff engineer; Motif modernization of large COBOL/TTY manufacturing systems; two issued patents on factory-floor OO architecture and relationship viewing. Moonlighted two days a week maintaining SGI's Motif toolkit — libXpm stewardship, maze demo X11 extensions (FreeBSD man page), WINTERP.
• Teknowledge (1985): Apprentice Knowledge Engineer — expert systems on Xerox Lisp Machines (Interlisp-D); first commercial AI wave; inspectable live environments still shape design philosophy. Came to it from pre-software R&D at Allison Transmission (GM).

Selected work

Spec cleanroom / proto-specs — Publishes implementation-derivable SPEC.md documents (not source) as coding-agent benchmarks; independent cleanroom builds by different agents from the same specs with no shared implementation access.

Real-time prototype suite — proto-poker & proto-retro (Vercel + Upstash Redis + SSE, zero-build Web Components): in active weekly use for sprint estimation and retros at Shield Legal LLC — not demos, adopted tooling; the pair whose specs seeded the cleanroom benchmark above.

eswat2-mcp — Personal knowledge base as hybrid MCP + REST (Python, MCP SDK, FastAPI): biography, projects, research, specs, gallery, vault. Four UIs from one KB — server-rendered documents, searchable wiki, 2D knowledge graph, WebGL 3D graph. Live: eswat2-mcp.vercel.app.

YAML / MCP UI platform — Five dual-protocol MCP servers + Juris runtime: write YAML once for live Proofs/preview, then export production Lit or Stencil web components. Runtime is deterministic after parse — probabilistic LLM work stays in authoring. Agents and humans use the same MCP + REST surface.

Action–state reference suite — Independent research: four apps (autos, funnel, sudoku, tinker) with multi-framework ports (autos 7 / funnel 8 / tinker 8 / sudoku 10, including Custom Element variants). Shared action–state pattern and custom Tailwind plugin; nearly identical behavior across React, Stencil, Lit, uCE, Svelte, Solid, Preact, and Vue. Direct foundation for MCP-driven UI contracts. Selected implementations at github.com/eswat2.

Long-form portfolio, framework tables, and full career history: eswat2.github.io

Patents

• US 5,398,336 — Object-oriented architecture for factory floor management (Consilium)
• US 5,295,242 — Viewing relationships in a factory floor management system (Consilium)
• US 4,449,422 — Transmission center support mounting (Allison / GM mechanical era)

Education

BS, Mechanical Engineering (Cum Laude) — Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN