Brian Maloney

Design Director & Illustrator in Austin, TX

brian@brianmaloney.combrianmaloney.comlinkedin.com/in/brianmaloney

Summary

Design leader with over 25 years of experience shipping software, from large-scale enterprise platforms to consumer mobile apps at startups. I build and lead design teams, set vision and creative direction, and stay hands-on with day-to-day design and front-end development. I ensure my teams advocate for our users at every step of the experience — discovery through delivery.

At Cisco Cybersecurity, I'm working with colleagues to embed AI into our core processes — from prototyping and submitting PRs to using MCP to connect AI tools with research repositories and user analytics, grounding design decisions and AI-generated design assets in customer feedback. I believe AI empowers everyone to ship. I use Visual Studio and Claude Code to deliver.

Experience

Design Director

2025–Present

Cisco — Network-Embedded Security

  • Lead design for a portfolio of SaaS and on-prem applications, managing a team of 12 designers across 7 security products and multiple strategic quarterly initiatives
  • My role is a player/coach model where I regularly prototype and ship to production using my AI toolchain and experience in front-end technologies
  • Evangelize an ecosystem minded design culture that thinks in terms of systems rather than product walled gardens. We're API/MCP first, ensuring that capabilities driving successful user outcomes surface at the platform level through AI interfaces and agentic experiences.

Design Director

2017–2025

Cisco — Threat Detection & Response

  • Led design and UI dev for 5 SaaS products, 2 platforms (XDR & SecureX) and the Cisco Security Cloud Splunk App (#1 in Firewall, 60k+ downloads)
  • Set creative vision and hired the design and UI dev teams to build SecureX, Cisco's first security platform launched in 2020.
  • Created the SecureX Ribbon and suite of embeddable 3rd party JavaScript widgets for cross-product cybersecurity use cases

Technical Design Leader

2015–2017

Cisco — IoT Platform

  • Design Lead and front-end developer for Kinetic, Cisco's IoT operations platform launched in 2017
  • Created the platform's initial design system, identity and launch campaign materials
  • Regularly conducted user research including onsite interviews, usability testing, and hardware installation with Swift Transportation, Kinetic's primary high-scale, lighthouse customer

Lead Design Technologist

2014–2015

Honeywell

  • Created and led the prototyping initiative for the Honeywell Lyric home thermostat mobile app
  • Developed native iPhone and Android apps using Titanium including custom components and the interactive Honeywell thermostat wheel
  • Integrated user telemetry (Lookback) for detailed research session playback and analysis

Director of User Experience

2012–2014

Vobi

  • Responsible for the software experience across web (desktop and mobile), iOS, Android and native Win/Mac platforms
  • Supported the Android and iOS teams with UX design and production ready artwork and the Web App team with design and cross-device, cross-browser front end code
  • Worked with the executive team and external partners to guide product direction across both enterprise deployments and Vobi's direct to consumer model

Director of User Experience

2010–2012

Compass Learning

  • Management of the User Experience & Mobile Teams spanning multiple products and platforms in the primary and secondary education space (grades K-12). Led the UX modernization of Compass Learning Odyssey, a web app with over 4 million active users and 40,000+ concurrent users.
  • As the Mobile Team Manager I led Compass Learning's first effort into the App Store ecosystem. My responsibilities included creative direction, hiring, product management, and partner relationships. I led a team of iOS Developers, UX Designers, and managed our content delivery partnership with OnLive as we migrated over 15,000 Flash-based activities to iOS.

Skills

Design

A typical week involves deep critical thinking to solve for complex cybersecurity use cases, prototyping with Claude Code, designing presentations and readouts with Codex, wireframing workflows in Miro, reviewing user analytics, reading through research, and evaluating my team's design initiatives.

Tools

Most days I'm using Claude Code, Codex, VS Code, GitHub, Jira, Dovetail, Figma, Miro, Illustrator, and Photoshop if I'm illustrating.

Development

Lately I've been prototyping with Claude Code and v0. With cloud native products I keep a local environment up to date, develop and submit PRs via Claude Code. I still hack a bit with HTML and CSS but in my AI toolchain that mostly involves inspecting in dev tools to see where Claude or Codex went astray.

Leadership

I manage 7 product design teams, multiple quarterly initiatives (strategic portfolio bets), facilitate workshops, provide mentorship, and serve as a strategic advisor with executive leadership.

Education

Bachelor of Fine Arts

1995

University of Texas at Austin