Frequently asked questions
The questions recruiters and hiring managers ask most often, answered directly.
What is Chevis Zhou's professional background and current role?
Chevis Zhou is a product design engineer based in Fairfax, Virginia. He works end to end on the product interface — user research and interaction design through to production React and TypeScript — and he came to it from STEM, with a microelectronics degree before a Human Factors master's. The same job is advertised under several names, so the roles that match his work are also titled Design Engineer, Design Technologist, Technical Product Designer, UX Engineer, and Product Designer.
What is Chevis Zhou's technical stack?
Chevis builds in React, TypeScript, Next.js and Tailwind CSS, with MDX for content and Motion for animation; this site is that stack, written by him and deployed on Vercel. Figma is the design half, including token architecture and component libraries that engineering adopts. He also works daily in agentic coding tools — Claude Code and Cursor — and writes about how to direct them.
Can Chevis Zhou write production code, or is he strictly a designer?
He ships production code, and the scope is the interface rather than the whole system: front-end architecture, components, state and interaction, not backend services or data modeling. The evidence is auditable — cheviszhou.com is his own Next.js codebase, and the AethrDesign case study documents client web apps built and shipped in production React. Where he hands off instead, the handoff is code-synced components rather than a Figma file thrown over the wall.
Why did Chevis Zhou move from microelectronics into design engineering?
He started in hardware, with a B.E. in Microelectronic Science and Engineering from SUSTech, which is where systems thinking came from — his capstone fitted an electronic-design optimization algorithm to a MATLAB cognition experiment. He wanted to build things people actually use, so he took an M.A. in Psychology (Human Factors and Applied Cognition) at George Mason, learning to run studies and design for human perception. Design engineering is where the two halves stop competing.
What is Chevis Zhou's educational background?
Chevis holds a B.E. in Microelectronic Science and Engineering from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and an M.A. in Psychology, Human Factors and Applied Cognition, from George Mason University. He is completing an M.S. in Information Studies at Trine University, on the computer-science side: the systems constraints and data strategy that sit behind a front end.
What work can I see, and what is each project known for?
Case studies are published at https://cheviszhou.com — 7 of them, each built around one theme so they read as separable answers rather than a pile: AethrDesign — AI-directed delivery system; Treevah — DesignOps; Solara — Visual design & systems; Solara — Brand identity; GMU — Academic research; SUSTech — Research engineering; Entagile — Credibility research. Every study shows the decisions and the constraints behind the work, not just the final screens.
Where has Chevis Zhou worked?
AethrDesign (2025 — Present), Treevah (2024 — 2025), Solara (2023 — 2024), and Vierra Digital, Campus Collect, and Entagile (2021 — 2023). Case studies cover the engagements with publishable work; the full timeline, including the earlier freelance years and the degree that overlapped them, is on the About page.
What does Chevis Zhou write about?
He publishes essays on design engineering at https://cheviszhou.com/writing — 10 of them so far, grouped as process, craft, and tools. They are working notes rather than thought leadership: what a tool actually cost him, what a redesign got wrong first, how a decision was made.
What is Chevis Zhou's design philosophy?
Understand the system, respect the human, and actually ship. In practice that means designing interfaces against the real constraints of the code underneath them, refusing dark patterns and attention-farming tactics, and investing in the component systems and design operations that let a whole team move rather than one designer.
Is Chevis Zhou available for full-time roles?
Yes — he is available for full-time product design engineer roles now, and the Trine M.S. is structured for working professionals, so it does not compete with a full-time job. He is based in Fairfax, Virginia and reachable at cheviszhou@gmail.com.