Hello! I'm Alina — a designer and AI researcher who thinks in systems and designs for people

I designed the Olympics app at the IOC through the Milano Cortina 2026 Games. I’ve worked remotely with European teams since 2023, with 3–4 hours of overlap in their working day. Open to B2B contracts or relocation.

Alina Iskakova

I've been in design for over 11 years, and the journey has been anything but linear. Starting with motion design taught me timing and storytelling. Graphic design and branding gave me a strong visual foundation. Eventually, product design became my focus — the discipline that brings everything together.

At Documentolog, I became the first designer in a 120-person company. I spent years building a design team from scratch, advocating for design's place at the table, and growing five designers — one of whom is now a team lead. I was voted Employee of the Year by both peers and management. That experience shaped how I see leadership: it's about teaching, not managing.

Then came Allianz Partners in France and Poland, and most recently the IOC — the Olympics app through the Milano Cortina 2026 Games and 110 million fans. Geography stopped being a constraint a long time ago.

  • App Lead Designer
    IOC — International Olympic Committee
    Owned the design of the Flame to Flame (F2F) app, which keeps fans with the Olympics between Games. Together with the website, it reached 110M fans at Milano Cortina 2026. Led the full redesign of the homepage, feed and personalization. Rebuilt the app’s design system as a white-label foundation.
    Nov 2024 – Aug 2026
  • Senior Product Designer
    Allianz Partners (Allyz Assist)
    Sole designer on the Allyz Assist insurance platform. Designed the full product from blank page — UX research, information architecture, UI, and a design system later adopted across all Allyz verticals. MVP launched in France, expanded to Poland.
    Aug 2023 – Nov 2024
  • Head of Design Department
    Documentolog
    Built and led the design team — hiring, mentoring, and setting up design processes across the organization. Voted Employee of the Year by both peers and management.
    Feb 2023 – Aug 2023
  • Product Designer
    Documentolog
    Joined as the first in-house designer at a 120-person company. Built the design system and visual language from scratch, redesigned core product flows, and grew the team to 5 designers.
    Dec 2020 – Feb 2023
  • UX/UI Designer
    Mastercard
    Designed UX/UI for financial services products within the Mastercard ecosystem.
    2018 – 2019
  • UX/UI Designer
    BI Group
    Designed digital products for one of Kazakhstan's largest construction and real estate developers.
    2017 – 2018
  • UX Research
  • UI Design
  • Product Design
  • Design Systems
  • Prototyping
  • User Testing
  • Information Architecture
  • Wireframing
  • CJM / UJM
  • A/B Testing
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Motion Design
  • Graphic Design
  • Branding
  • Figma
  • Figma Sites
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Notion
  • Miro
  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Zeplin
  • Claude Code
  • Figma MCP
  • Cursor
  • HTML / CSS
  • Python
  • React
  • Russian — Native
  • English — Professional
  • Kazakh — Basic
Systems thinking
I start with the business problem, then design the logic that holds the product together as it grows.
Proactive ownership
I go past the brief: find the real problem, propose the direction, and see it through to release.
Cross-functional
I make the work easier to follow: clear decisions, shared systems, and a plan teams can use.
Range
Motion, branding, graphic, product, AI research — eleven years across disciplines, and each of them still shows in how I solve problems.
AI, from both sides
I know AI from two angles — as a designer who builds with it, and as a researcher who studies how people actually behave around it. That combination shapes how I think about trust, friction, and where AI products break down for real users.
Cognitive Psychology
& Neuropsychology

I study attention, memory, decision-making and trust — and apply that lens to how people experience AI interfaces. The gap between cognitive reality and current UX conventions is one of the more interesting open problems right now.

University of Cambridge certificate ↗

What forms between an AI model and its history of interaction — and what quietly disappears when the model is replaced. I study this empirically: behavior documented for a year and a half, across three model generations, with no claims about consciousness. MnemNet, the metamemory layer for agents that grew out of the research, now powers ALETHA, a product going into closed beta on 27 November.

ALETHA · closed beta 27.11 · join the waitlist ↗

Let's do something
great together