Federico Kotek is a product designer in Buenos Aires, working remotely on industrial software for Autodesk.

Product designer, builder, and a wannabe design engineer. years designing B2B software (which is a long stretch to spend on screens most people never see, but I digress). Right now that is Autodesk, where I work on asset intelligence for maintenance. Before the acquisition it was MaintainX, where the person using the app is standing under a broken conveyor with one hand free and a shift ending in twenty minutes.

Before that, card issuing infrastructure at Pomelo and delivery routing at Mercado Libre. These days most of my prototypes start in code, with a coding agent working next to me (or should I say in front?). I still think that if it needs a tutorial, it isn’t finished.

Where I have worked.

Ten years across logistics, fintech and industrial software, most recently at Autodesk.

Case studies.

Four projects from the last seven years. Each one opens into a full case.

Software for the people who fix the machines

MaintainX is the CMMS frontline industrial teams use to log work orders, track assets and keep plants running. I was lead designer on Reporting, Search, Automations and Chat, the parts of the app people open every shift.

I shipped Report Builder AI, which builds a report from a sentence typed in plain language. Since the acquisition I’ve been at Autodesk, working on asset intelligence and connected data strategy for maintenance.

Acquired by Autodesk, 2026

Read the case

CMMS Reporting & search AI Report Builder AI

The dashboard banks run their card programs on

Pomelo is fintech infrastructure for Latin America. I designed the partner dashboards, where banks and neobanks run their card and account programs, and grew them from a handful of partners to dozens.

As lead I ran the UX team, still designing Billing and Automations myself, and got us building reusable systems where we used to design feature by feature. The case study is about billing, which we moved from a spreadsheet to invoices built from each contract. On-time invoices went from 22% to 95%.

Read the case

Fintech-as-a-service Partner dashboards Design systems Led the UX team

Routing the packages that used to go out in an Uber

Mercado Envíos is around 2M delivery assignments a day across six countries. The team I joined was new and had to build the router that would replace an external program. I gave exceptions a screen of their own, which cut daily exception resolution time by 40% and helped cut manual route planning by 70% across more than forty facilities.

Next to it I designed a simulator, where a planner runs a routing, compares it with earlier ones and only publishes the one they trust.

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Logistics Routing −40% exception resolution time

Letting each region set up its own facilities

Alongside routing I designed GT, four internal tools for coverage, transit times, capacity and the connections between facilities. Setting up a new facility used to take eleven days, configured by hand in Excel. We gave the tools to the people running each region, and it went down to under three hours.

I was the only designer, with thirty developers, so I wrote very detailed specs: every table, every state a configuration can be in, and what happens on every click.

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Internal tools Role-based IA 11 days → 3 hours

Fun side projects.

Things I make on my own time. Making them is how I learn fastest. All five are live, and each has a page of field notes on what I was after and what broke.

What I work with.

Most of my prototypes now start in code, with a coding agent working next to me. This site was designed and built that way, down to the checks that keep it on the grid.

Elsewhere.

The long version.

Seventeen years (if you count the motion graphics). Most of it taught me that the interesting problems are the ones nobody wants to look at.

Experience
Education

Got something hard to design?

I like talking to people building almost anything: a tool for the shop floor, a bank, a map, a toy. If someone uses it and it gets in their way, I want to hear about it. Based in Buenos Aires. Write to me in English or Spanish (or Spanglish).