Josh Santangelo

Josh Santangelo

San Francisco, CA, US, he/him

About

I build and manage design and technical teams that craft incredible user experiences in unconventional contexts.

Contact

LinkedIn

Work Experience

2023 — Now
San Francisco

Managing a team that crafts fundamental experiences across PlayStation products. Scope includes design systems, accessibility, prototyping, internal design tools, search, voice, accounts, and player safety.

2020 — 2023
San Francisco

Built an engineering team that acts as a technical partner to product designers across the design org at PlayStation. Design Technology builds feature prototypes for PS5, mobile, desktop, VR, and web. Depending on the job they'll use production code integrated into real products or rapid prototyping tools. In addition the team creates bespoke design tools, plugins, and customizations to support collaboration, consistency, and accessibility.

2018 — 2019
San Francisco

Led a distributed team that designed and implemented hardware platforms behind large-scale immersive experiences for agency clients and MSG Sphere.

  • Directed the production of playback systems for high-resolution video content using projection, LED, and traditional displays.

  • Created and managed a team to build an ingestion and rendering pipeline to handle super-resolution content in a hybrid on-premises/cloud infrastructure.

  • Negotiated multiple $1M+ vendor agreements for hardware and software.

  • Managed a team that provided external and internal customer support for large-format video installations and custom VR tools.

2010 — 2018
San Francisco

Managed all technical disciplines of a digital agency across multiple offices, including software development, systems engineering, QA, deployment, and support. Deployed projects in the US, Europe, Asia, and Middle East.

  • Recruited engineering staff, freelancers, and vendors, converging a broad set of capabilities to apply to client projects.

  • Collaborated with sales and design teams to translate project requirements into realistic timelines and budgets which landed client engagements.

  • Implemented standards for developing, testing, deploying, supporting, and documenting projects, ensuring robustness and 24/7 operation.

  • Promoted R&D of environmental sensing technologies based on Bluetooth, RFID, ultra-wideband, and computer vision, which enabled interaction beyond touchscreens.

  • Built monitoring and show-control tools to ensure continuous operation and reduce repetitive engineering tasks.

  • Directed the engineering behind public immersive projects which have run continuously for years.

2008 — 2010
Seattle

Co-founded a digital agency focused on emerging multi-user natural interaction paradigms. Implemented novel user interfaces using emerging hardware and software technologies.

2006 — 2007
Lead Engineer at Microsoft
Redmond, WA

Architected and implemented high-polish demo applications for the not-yet-announced Microsoft Surface touch table as a contractor.

  • Embedded with the design team to translate static design comps into fluid, functioning software.

  • Created bulletproof and flexible applications on prototype hardware and a rudimentary software toolkit.

Projects

2007

An incomplete collection of interactive projects that I've been involved in or engineered personally from 2007-present. Most of these are from my decade at the agency Stimulant. Scattered among those are small free-time side-quests.

Side Projects

2023

Projection mapping on the tile in my kitchen at home.

2022

Data visualization of the tokens in an NFT project.

2020

Dynamically generating and exploring Sol LeWitt's "Drawing Series".

Education

1997 — 1999
Seattle

"Multimedia" was defined literally in this program to include painting, drawing, lighting, video and audio production, typography, graphic design, and computer programming.

Teams

Current
PlayStation