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. Open to new opportunities and to relocation.

Alina Iskakova
Story

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.

Most recently I was a Senior Product Designer at the International Olympic Committee, designing for one of the most watched events on earth.

Looked at from above, the trajectory tells its own story: it started at Documentolog in Astana, Kazakhstan, then the jump to the international market with Allianz Partners in France and Poland, and then the Olympics and 110 million fans worldwide — eight years in product design. Geography stopped being a constraint a long time ago.

Experience
  • Senior Product Designer
    IOC — International Olympic Committee
    Senior designer on the Flame to Flame (F2F) app — the experience that keeps the Olympics running between Games, for 110M+ users. Led full redesign of homepage, feed, and personalization. Built a white-label design system from scratch.
    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 Russia
    Designed UX/UI for financial services products within the Mastercard ecosystem.
    Apr – Aug 2020
  • UX/UI Designer
    BI Group
    Designed digital products for one of Kazakhstan's largest construction and real estate developers.
    Oct 2017 – Jan 2019
Design Skills
  • 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
Tools & Platforms
  • Figma
  • Figma Sites
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Notion
  • Miro
  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Zeplin
AI & Dev Tools
  • Claude Code
  • Figma MCP
  • Cursor
  • HTML / CSS
  • Python
  • React
Languages
  • Russian — Native
  • English — Professional
  • Kazakh — Basic
What I bring
Systems thinking
I start with the business problem, then design the logic that holds the product together as it grows.
Proactive ownership
I plan beyond the immediate brief: solving the problem in front of the business while putting systems in place that prevent the next one.
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 means I approach every problem with a wider lens than most.
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.
Beyond Design
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.

Coursera cert
AI Research

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 over eleven months, across three model generations, with no claims about consciousness. MnemNet is the open-source memory architecture that grew out of the research.

GitHub

Let's do something
great together

Say hello ↗ LinkedIn Behance GitHub