Design Engineer, Intent + Delight, 15+ years

Nico van Zyl — Independent Design Engineer

About Nico van Zyl

Helping startups, scale-ups and enterprises build and ship useful digital products to extremely high standards. Currently head of product design at Altostrat, building network operations products for engineers, teams and agents. Co-founded, designed and built Owners Circle, a platform for drivers to manage and enjoy their enthusiast & investment cars. Previously led design and development for Simvida, Stream, Woom and Imagemakers, shipping better products, faster.

Helping startups, scale-ups and enterprises build and ship useful digital products to extremely high standards. Currently head of product design at Altostrat, building network operations products for engineers, teams and agents. Co-founded, designed and built Owners Circle, a platform for drivers to manage and enjoy their enthusiast & investment cars. Previously led design and development for Simvida, Stream, Woom and Imagemakers, shipping better products, faster.

Selected work

Product design and design engineering

Selected work includes network operations products for Altostrat, the Owners Circle platform for enthusiast and investment cars, financial-planning products for Simvida and RetireDirect, and production design systems used by product teams. The portfolio covers product definition, interface architecture, user experience, frontend implementation and the operational detail required to ship coherent software.

Evidence from collaborators

Collaborators describe Nico as a reliable design and development partner with strong communication, modern technical judgment and an unusual ability to combine interface quality with complete, production-ready solutions. The visual reel contains selected product screens, interaction recordings and attributed client notes.