I'm austra.
Money moving between banks, an AI reading your symptoms, a business clearing compliance. I make the complicated feel easy.
Nine years across financial services, healthtech, and enterprise software. I led design for an AI symptom checker used by 5.5 million people and certified as a medical device, a finance system that invoiced $500 million in five months, and the fund platforms the world's biggest banks rely on.
Occasionally I write down what the work teaches me. Who uses a fund profile? The one I'm working through now is The gap AI is deepening. Why buying AI changes nothing, and deciding where it belongs changes everything.
The best feedback I never asked for
At a friend's Christmas party, I got talking to a woman I'd never met. At some point she mentioned she uses UniProt. Half a million people do, every month. I asked which she preferred, tables or cards. Cards, she said. With a table you hunt across columns and hold the whole thing in your head. A card just shows you one protein, all at once. You read it instead of piecing it together.
Then she realised I'd designed it. "You made this? I remember what it was like before. I really needed this. Thank you."
The card design was my first project at UniProt, whilst I was working at the European Bioinformatics Institute. For a moment, a stranger at a party made me feel like a bit of a celebrity.
