Creative Technologist

Joel Lithgow

A designer who codes and an artist who ships — I help people think visually.

As a forward deployed engineer at an AI startup I build document-extraction pipelines and client demos end to end. Previously I was the primary designer and developer behind cca.edu, where I led an accessibility overhaul across its digital and print properties. Off the clock I run @thisisahousegallery, a gallery out of my living room.

Experience

Forward Deployed Engineer

LazarusAI
2026 – Present full time

Forward deployed engineer embedded with sales, taking AI claims-audit use cases from prototype to production for enterprise insurance clients.

Build end-to-end AI document extraction pipelines using LazarusAI AIE engine and LiteLLM for insurance, workers comp, and underwriting use cases
Partner directly with sales to scope, build, and deploy customer-facing demos from rapid prototypes to production-grade Dockerized apps on EC2
Develop multi-tenant insurance claims quality audit infrastructure with LLM and RAG pipelines over unstructured claim documents producing structured audit outputs with LLM tracing and explainability
Design and ship internal tooling including an agentic Slack bot for Jira product board management and a sales calendar integration for meeting triage
Highlights
  • Shipped a multi-agent pipeline auditing insurance claims against 150+ compliance checks across 17+ sections
  • Reached 97% audit accuracy in a validation workshop with a global insurance carrier — 3,635 checks across 32 claims, only 107 SME overrides
  • Drove a config-driven pipeline serving 4 enterprise insurers; took the flagship engagement, a $2M+ ARR opportunity, from POC toward paid pilot

UX Designer / Developer

California College of the Arts
2023 – 2026 full time

Primary developer behind cca.edu, building and maintaining frontend applications for the marketing and communications department.

Develop and maintain frontend applications for the marketing and communications department
Build interactive editorial experiences for the college newsroom using modern web technologies
Highlights
  • Led an accessibility overhaul, setting WCAG AA color-contrast standards across digital properties and replacing non-compliant link colors
  • Built Playwright automation, cutting CMS QA from weeks to hours
  • Helped migrate infrastructure to Docker and Google Cloud Run

Junior UX Designer

California College of the Arts
2021 – 2023 full time

Designed interfaces for web properties and marketing campaigns, from wireframes and prototypes to final design specifications.

Ran user research and usability testing to inform design decisions
Partnered with developers to ship responsive, accessible designs
Produced wireframes, prototypes, and detailed design specifications

QA Specialist

California College of the Arts
2017 – 2019 student

Established systematic QA processes for the college's web properties, improving defect detection across multiple platforms.

Identified and documented accessibility issues with remediation plans
Partnered with developers to prioritize and resolve bugs
Wrote test documentation and regression-testing procedures

Selected Work