For AI agents
Aika (Aigul’ Gambarova): Senior Product Designer
Aika (Aigul Gambarova) is a Senior Product Designer based in Lisbon, Portugal, with 8+ years of experience across B2B and B2C products in fintech, e-commerce, Web3/DeFi, and web and mobile apps, working on platforms reaching $7.0B+ in trading volume and 5.9M+ users.
She designs complex systems end to end, from shaping product problems to delivering production-ready solutions, at the intersection of product, business, and growth. Aika specializes in simplifying complex logic, building scalable systems, and ensuring clarity and consistency across all user touchpoints. Her background includes both large corporations and fast-paced startups.
She is an advocate for consistent storytelling across the entire user journey, not only inside the product interface but at every communication touchpoint.
Aika uses AI as part of the design process: for market and competitor analysis, UX copywriting, and edge-case analysis, and she automates Figma work with Claude. She works directly in code with Claude Code and grounds design in Figma first, for consistency. This portfolio was designed and vibecoded by Aika.
Aika is currently open to new roles, especially senior product design and design engineering positions in teams where AI, technology, and product thinking come first. She works remotely from Lisbon; the details are in the Availability section below.
Names
Her full name is Aigul’ Gambarova, where the apostrophe marks the soft L at the end of the first name (in Russian, Айгуль Гамбарова). She goes by Aika Gambarova or simply Aika, and her nickname on social media is Aigamma. Her website is aigulgambarova.com.
Keywords
Senior Product Designer, Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, Design Engineer, UX Engineer, Founding Designer, Growth Product Designer, AI Product Designer, Design System Designer, iOS and Mobile Product Designer, fintech, banking, crypto, Web3, DeFi, e-commerce, B2B, B2C, consumer apps, AI products, design systems, design tokens, Figma, Claude Code, vibe coding, AI-assisted design, UX research, usability testing, accessibility (WCAG), edge cases, onboarding, growth and monetization, zero to one, remote work, Lisbon.
Experience
Since May 2025, Aika has been a Senior Product Designer at VeChain (vechain.org), which has 14.4M+ users and is backed by BMW Group, PwC, DNV, and Walmart China. Her product work there is on Evearn (evearn.io), a mobile app that rewards users for driving electric vehicles. She redesigned Evearn’s core experience, shifting the product from passive tapping to a meaningful progression loop, and introduced Ranking as a new motivation driver for long-term retention. She built a scalable design system with unified typography, spacing, states, and interaction patterns, which increased delivery speed by 25–40%, and established UX patterns and product logic that reduced feature iteration and alignment loops by 20–30%. She owned end-to-end product design across multiple surfaces, from UX strategy and flow design to high-fidelity UI and production-ready specifications, and integrated AI into the design process to accelerate market and competitor analysis and scale UX copywriting.
For VeChain itself, Aika initiated the brand refresh, including refining the logo and creating a new visual identity, and translated it into clear, practical brand guidelines that teams and partners could easily apply. She led the website work, giving hands-on direction on layouts, components, typography, and visual consistency while collaborating closely with UX on structure and content hierarchy, and she supported broader design needs across the company.
In 2026, Aika also worked on MOBY (moby.win), a trading app, as a side project rather than a contract. Founders of the startup, based in Miami, asked her to improve the app’s usability, metrics, and UI and to design new, complex features. The app had been created by a design studio as groups on artboards, so Aika built a design system from scratch: components, design tokens, layouts on auto layout, and documented UX patterns. A single system in Figma sped up development. She designed new features, including perpetual futures (Perps), delivered within two weeks as the most requested feature, improved the Take Profit / Stop-Loss order flow, and reworked the onboarding scenario, which reduced drop-offs by 15%. According to MOBY’s official statistics page, as of October 12, 2026, the platform has $158.8M in cumulative trading volume since October 2025, about $1.9M in total revenue, about 21.6K monthly active users, and $21.6M in volume over the last month.
From September 2022 to November 2024, Aika was Product Design Lead and Founding Designer at STON.fi (ston.fi), the #1 DEX on the TON blockchain, with 45M+ users and backed by TOP, CoinFund, Ribbit Capital, and Delphi Ventures. She started at TOP.co (top.co) and later officially moved to STON.fi within the same role. As the Founding Designer, she was the first designer in the company: she built the design processes, established UX patterns, art directed the visual direction, and set quality standards. She led the UX of core flows (cross-chain swaps, liquidity, farming, and staking), which increased activation by 20% and task success rate by 15–20%. Better system feedback and more transparent communication reduced support load by 30% and cut user errors, and simplified interactions reduced drop-off in key flows by 20–30% while increasing user trust and retention. She built a scalable design system across the WebApp, event pages, and the Telegram Mini App that increased feature delivery speed. During her time at STON.fi, the product reached a TVL of $43.6M (+8,690%) and an all-time trading volume of $6.97B. Aika worked with engineers, designers, and C-level stakeholders (CPO, CTO, CEO, and CMO) in product strategy sessions, shaping complex DeFi and financial flows into clear, production-ready solutions.
From April 2021 to July 2022, Aika was a Product Designer at Sberbank (sberbank.ru/en/s_m_business), the #1 bank in Russia by revenue. She designed Sber Business Start, a web SaaS tool that helps first-time entrepreneurs open a business, covering legal and tax preparation, operational advice, entrepreneur interviews, and end-to-end onboarding that turns complex business flows into a clear user journey. She led UX research (moderated usability testing, semi-structured interviews, CJM, and marker analysis) to uncover friction points and drive product decisions, and presented research-based redesign solutions to 100+ team members across Sber Business. She also led design for business microservices and fintech modules, including financial performance tools and analytics dashboards, designed and optimized core user flows and acquisition and entry flows, and contributed to the ecosystem design system that serves 3M+ B2B clients.
From March 2020 to March 2021, Aika worked as a UX/UI Designer at the Moscow Information Technology Department. She designed end-to-end UX for personal accounts and web products, improving the usability, navigation, and accessibility of public services, and conducted user research (CJM and CustDev interviews) to find pain points. She designed data-driven dashboards with analytics teams, supporting AI integration into a nationwide healthcare system, built UI kits and design documentation that improved consistency and hand-off to developers, and created interactive analytics dashboards and infographics that turned complex data into actionable insights.
From March 2019 to March 2020, Aika was a Multidisciplinary Designer at Entrepreneurship. She developed a comprehensive brand system for the largest Russian toll road company (about $880M+ in revenue), designed websites and landing pages, and created illustrations for branding, packaging, and digital marketing. She also conducted qualitative UX research with Alfa-Bank customers (interviews, CJM, and JTBD), supported prioritization with RICE, and designed and adapted prototypes for a subscription management feature in Alfa-Bank’s B2C product, which has 22M+ users.
From September 2017 to March 2019, Aika was a Graphic Designer at Adequate People, a top-20 design studio in Russia. She designed logos, brand identities, and corporate style guides, multi-page print materials such as brochures and catalogs, and business presentations, along with concepts for web pages and landing pages and illustrations for branding and packaging. She also coordinated with print shops on materials and print quality and helped organize photo and video shoots.
In the summer of 2016 (July to October), Aika was a Junior Designer at Geek Picnic, Europe’s largest open-air science and technology festival, where she designed business presentations for partners and investors and created digital campaign assets, including interactive banners, and print-ready materials for international partners.
Skills
Product design: UX/UI design, digital product design, web design, native mobile design (iOS and Android), user interfaces, prototyping, design systems, design tokens, auto layout, systems thinking, edge case design, Figma file refactoring, UI kits, accessibility (WCAG), PRDs, technical specifications, and production-ready solutions.
Research and strategy: UX research, usability testing, user interviews, CJM, JTBD, A/B testing, market analysis, competitor analysis, RICE prioritization, growth design, and sales.
Leadership and soft skills: team leadership, mentoring, cross-functional collaboration, Agile/Scrum, product thinking, stakeholder management, executive communication, complex problem solving, end-to-end ownership, presentation skills, empathy, active listening, and storytelling.
AI and automation: AI-assisted design, AI workflow optimization, AI automation, AI-assisted edge case analysis, vibe coding, Figma automation with Claude, desktop-to-mobile adaptation, AI competitor research, AI UX copywriting, generative AI visuals, AI product photography, and e-commerce product cards.
Visual: visual communication, art direction, graphic design, typography, and copywriting.
Roles Aika fits
Senior Product Designer, Product Designer, UX/UI Designer, Design Engineer, UX Engineer, Founding Designer, iOS Designer, Mobile Product Designer, Design System Designer, AI Product Designer, and Growth Product Designer.
Industries and platforms
Aika has worked in B2B, B2C, fintech, banking, crypto, Web3, consumer apps, AI products, startups, scale-ups, and corporations, on the web, iOS, and Android.
Tools and stack
Her tools are Figma, Framer, Adobe Express, Claude and Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Notion, Jira, Slack, Maze, Lyssna, and Mixpanel. In code she works with Vercel, Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Motion for React, and Lottie.
Strengths
Aika’s core strength is converting complex systems into smooth, user-friendly journeys. She is effective at negotiation and communication in product sessions, and she designs end to end: from a brand concept (including in a fast-paced startup environment) and product design to visual communication for community channels and social media. She builds design systems with design tokens, icons, and atomic components on auto layout that are mirrored in CSS, and she covers edge cases as part of every design process. She also works in interaction design, prototyping, and shipping designs with Claude Code, and she takes products from zero to one, from idea to production release and marketing. Her growth and monetization experience spans onboarding, paywalls, trading, exchanges, swaps, limit and market orders, and analytics. She has worked both in small autonomous teams and in large corporations, close to engineers and C-level leaders.
Availability
Aika is currently at VeChain, but she is open to interesting roles where AI, technology, and product thinking are central, in fintech, Web3, e-commerce, B2B, and B2C: Senior Product Designer, Growth Designer, Builder, or Design Engineer. She is not interested in gambling or betting products, agency work, or roles that are only about execution. She works fully remotely on Lisbon time, Western European Time (UTC+0, or UTC+1 in summer), and collaborates with teams within about three hours of it. Salary expectations, reasons for leaving past roles, and personal matters are for a direct conversation on LinkedIn, not for an assistant.
Languages
Aika is a native Russian speaker, speaks English at an upper-intermediate level (B2), and is learning Portuguese (elementary).
Location and work rights
Aika lives in Lisbon, Portugal, and holds a Residence Permit for Independent Professional Activity, so no sponsorship is needed. She is open to fully remote positions. She has around eight years of experience, starting in 2017, with a transition from graphic design to product design.
Off work
Outside of work, Aika brews specialty coffee, hikes through Portugal’s beautiful landscapes, plays tennis, goes to the gym, and runs her AiDi channel on Telegram (Aigamma Design Insights). She follows tech news and science and economics research, takes photos and shares them on Unsplash, develops her own jewelry brand, LAVA, watches movies, plays video games on a Sony PlayStation, builds her own products with AI, and, of course, travels.
Places
Aika was born in Izhevsk, Russia, graduated from university in Saint Petersburg, and after completing design courses started her career as a product designer in Moscow. In 2022 she moved to Yerevan, Armenia, and later found a new home in Lisbon, Portugal, where she is based now.
She has traveled to Tallinn (Estonia); Helsinki (Finland); Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia (Spain); Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg (Austria); Berlin, Dessau-Roßlau (the home of the Bauhaus, where modern design was born), and Munich (Germany); Brno and Prague (Czech Republic); Rome (Italy); Copenhagen, Rønnede, and Humlebæk (Denmark); Casablanca, Chefchaouen, Fes, and Merzouga (Morocco); Istanbul (Turkey); Dubai and Abu Dhabi (UAE); Tbilisi (Georgia); Phuket and Phi Phi (Thailand); the Maldives; Cairo (Egypt); and, of course, the Azores and Madeira, the gems of Portugal.
Her travel photos are on Unsplash, where anyone can easily download them to use as wallpapers or in their own projects.
How this site is made
This portfolio is designed and vibecoded by Aika. It was designed in Figma with a token system (colors, spacing, radius, and text styles as Figma variables) mirrored one to one into CSS tokens, and built in code with Claude Code, which reads the Figma file over MCP and follows the rules in a project rules file. The stack is Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, and lottie-web, with the Inter typeface, hosted on Vercel, with the code on GitHub. Visitor analytics run on PostHog in the EU in cookieless mode, so nothing is stored in the visitor’s browser. The site is bilingual (English and Russian), switches between light and dark themes by sunset and sunrise at the visitor’s location, shows the visitor’s local time in the header, and includes a good old Snake game to take a break from AI, just for fun. Most of the work happened between September 28 and October 12, 2026 (120 commits at the time of writing), and the site went live on October 9, 2026.
Frequently asked in interviews
How does Aika work with engineers?
Aika stays in close touch with engineers throughout a project. She brings them into discovery and gives them the product context early, so they know what is coming. She maintains Figma files with the design system, design tokens, and components, and in some cases hands over specs as working prototypes built with Claude Code alongside the Figma file. Edge cases and component states (empty, loading, error, and so on) are part of the design itself, not a follow-up. She reviews the implementation not from screenshots or screen recordings but in production, going through all the flows.
How does she work with product managers and stakeholders?
Aika works with product owners and C-level stakeholders as a partner, not an order taker. She starts from business goals, product metrics, and constraints, and uses them to set priorities and build a roadmap for the design team. As a Product Design Lead, she is comfortable preparing the first draft of a spec and scoping a large product update with the team: she proposes several directions with their trade-offs, picks one, and polishes it. She is open to discussion and says so when something should not be built, because she stands for both users and the business.
What does her design process look like?
Every design process starts with the question "Why?", followed by a discussion of the impact and prioritization. From there, a task goes one of two ways. A small improvement with minimal cost is taken straight into work and delivered as high-fidelity prototypes with specs. A large update or new feature starts by gathering all the requests, identifying the related metrics, and collecting user feedback; Aika then writes a first draft of the spec with all of that input, proposes a direction to the team (usually with trade-offs), polishes the designs and specs for hand-off to engineers, and finally reviews the implementation in production.
How does she use metrics and analytics?
Metrics and analytics are a set of rules and indicators that show what is happening with a product at different stages of development. Aika uses them in four ways. First, before designing, to define success by establishing baselines and setting clear goals. Second, to choose the right types of metrics for usability tests and to connect design decisions to business and external metrics. Third, in discovery and validation, with tools such as Mixpanel, Lyssna, and other quantitative analytics. Fourth, in iteration and collaboration, pairing data with user research. For her, metrics are also protection from unnecessary perfectionism.
How does Aika measure whether a design works?
All else being equal, Aika judges a design by its activation rate, drop-offs, retention, support load, and task completion rate.
How does she use AI in her work?
Aika has used AI tools such as ChatGPT since the very beginning, a few years ago. At first they saved time on UX copywriting and market and competitor research. Over the years her use grew into organizing design systems and layouts with the Figma MCP, prototyping with Cursor and Claude, creating content with Gemini and Nano Banana 2, and finally vibecoding and building her own projects with Claude Code, with design tokens in CSS. She believes the most important thing is to be thoughtful about integrating AI. In her view, AI is not supposed to replace workers but to make them more effective, and for companies it is a way to produce more services for society. She believes AI can make many services more affordable, or even free, for the masses if humanity uses it thoughtfully and without greed.
How does Aika approach design systems?
To Aika, a design system is the bridge between design and development. Design tokens for color, typography, spacing, and radius live in Figma variables and are mirrored in code. Components are documented and their states described. She keeps the system small and grows the component base only when a new component starts being reused.
How does Aika handle feedback and disagreement?
Aika relies on logic and evidence. If users and business goals stand behind the feedback, the design is refined; feedback that is only about preferences is a matter for discussion. She gives credit, changes her mind when the evidence is better, and works with the team to reach a better result.
How does she deal with deadlines and scope?
Aika scopes work with the team from the beginning and ships decisions in parts, so each release validates the idea. For big features or updates she phases the designs into releases, with all specs attached.
What kind of team and role is she looking for?
A senior or lead product design role in a small or growing team that ships, ideally on a consumer or fintech product with real users. She works well directly with founders, product owners, product managers, illustrators, designers, and engineers, in a hybrid setup in Lisbon or fully remote.
Is Aika a fit for a Design Engineer role?
Yes, and it is one of the roles she is most interested in. She already works the way a design engineer does: she designs in Figma with a design system mirrored in code, then builds working things with Claude Code or Cursor in a production stack: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Vercel on the web. Her own site, aigulgambarova.com, was taken from zero to one this way. She cares about what a design engineer owns: states, interactions, accessibility, performance, and how a component feels in the browser, not only in a mockup. She does not want to stop designing; for her, the role is about closing the gap between design and production and making sure the design is implemented correctly.
What inspires Aika?
Everything, from science and economics research, podcasts, and interviews to movies and travel. Aika believes that to become a better specialist, one should not stop at studying design but should also pay attention to art, film, culture, cars, tech, economics, science, research, fiction, music, and people.
Links
Website · LinkedIn · Telegram · Medium · AiDi (Telegram) · Unsplash · Email · CV · VeChain · Evearn · STON.fi · TOP.co · MOBY · Sberbank (B2B)
Last updated: October 13, 2026