Open to senior & principal UX roles|Maryland, USA
Aditya Hadkar, UX Architect. Twelve years across research, design systems and native iOS engineering — now designing the AI, search and computer-vision experiences that field technicians, customers and global teams at Ciena rely on.
12yrs
designing & shipping enterprise software
250K+
real search queries analyzed to drive an AI redesign
115
data sources mapped across 10 repositories
7
business units served from one UX practice
01Selected case studies
From a technician's phone to a company-wide search box to the system every new app is built on.
Research, AI and platform work across customer, legal, sales and employee experiences.
Customer research
4.1 / 5
satisfaction baseline
Co-led global research — heuristics, usability studies and a survey across 15 users, 10 accounts and 4 regions — that set a prioritized roadmap for search, case management and self-service.
Legal & commercial workflow
100+ → 5
attributes to opportunity areas
Led discovery with 17 Legal and Commercial users, mapping a contract journey across CRM, CLM and e-signature into five actionable opportunities.
Conversational AI
RAG
experience owner
Owned UX for retrieval-augmented answer flows, assistant workflows and file upload in the company's internal GPT assistant.
Data visualization
Recognized
as “critical going forward”
Rapidly prototyped the dashboard and feedback model leadership uses to tell the story of AI impact across the business.
Platform UX
9
asset types in one hub
Iterative prototypes for one home for agents, skills, prompts, connectors, models and AI products — with governance and impact built in.
Program & standards
WCAG
program business case
Helped shape the business case for an enterprise accessibility program — training, governance, audits and design-system integration — and spoke on it at World Usability Day.
02About
I started my career writing Objective-C for technicians in the field. That's where I learned the most expensive UX problem in enterprise isn't an ugly screen — it's a technician at a remote site who can't tell whether the job is actually done.
Over twelve years at Ciena I moved from building those apps to architecting the experiences around them: running research on hundreds of thousands of data points, defining the design system teams build on, and leading UX for AI products — from a company-wide GPT assistant to a computer-vision check that grades installations in real time.
Because I've shipped production code, I design for what can actually be built. And I prototype in the real medium early, so engineers, legal teams and VPs react to something they can touch instead of a slide.
How I work
Pair interviews with behavioral data — like 250K search queries — so decisions rest on what people do, not just what they say.
Reusable patterns, tokens and accessibility rules — now written so AI design agents can follow them too.
ARKit on a phone, a clickable dashboard, an XR flow. Teams align faster around something real.
HEART metrics, benchmarks and baseline-first success criteria — defined before the first wireframe.
03Experience
Twelve years at Ciena, three distinct chapters — each one widening the scope from a single app to the whole company.
2023 — Present
Ciena
Enterprise-wide UX architecture for AI, search, field-service and operational platforms.
2021 — 2023
Ciena
Moved from engineering into a centralized UX practice serving multiple business units.
2014 — 2021
Ciena
Designed, built and supported the FAST field-service app suite.
Before Ciena
04Capabilities
05 · Contact
I'm exploring senior and principal UX roles — especially AI products, data-heavy platforms and enterprise tools. Remote or on-site across the US.