Andrew Houser
Front-end engineering leadership
& AI implementation strategy.
I lead front-end teams, and I still write the hard parts myself.
I manage the Customer Experience team at Milliman IntelliScript, act as the company's front-end architect, and own Sable, the design system behind 7 product applications.
- engineers on the team I lead
- sprint throughput on one team, year over year
- Sable components since I took it over
- product apps built on Sable
- Sable unit test and Storybook coverage
- dev server startup after moving to Vite
Building better front-ends across teams
I work at the intersection of engineering, design, and product to solve problems that span applications and teams. My focus is on creating systems, standards, and shared capabilities that help organizations deliver consistent, high-quality user experiences.
Most organizations don't struggle because of a lack of talent. They struggle because their front-end systems evolve without structure. Different teams build different patterns, components drift, and over time the user experience becomes inconsistent and harder to maintain. That's where I focus.
What I do:
- Lead front-end architecture and modernization efforts
- Grow and govern design systems and component libraries
- Improve accessibility, performance, and UX consistency
- Enable teams through shared patterns, tooling, and best practices
- Bridge design and engineering to ship better products faster
Leading front-end teams
I lead a 10-person team split across two product teams. That means hiring, coaching, setting the bar in code review, and making the hard calls when they're needed. I care most about building a team that gets faster because of the tools and habits it builds, not because it works longer hours.
Design systems people actually use
A component library only matters if teams use it. I grew Sable from about 25 components to about 60, took it to full test and Storybook coverage, and built pieces like the DataTable that teams are now moving to from AG Grid.
Front-end architecture
There's no dedicated front-end architect at Milliman, so I fill that role. I write the ADRs, work them through with our system architect, and turn them into blueprints, so a new project starts with the right decisions already made.
AI-assisted engineering
I built my team's AI development toolkit: agent workflows for spec-driven development, pull request review, and QA. The focus is practical: catch real problems earlier, spend less, and keep a human responsible for everything that ships.
Current Focus
Team Lead, Customer Experience
Milliman IntelliScript
Apr 2025 – Present
Staff Software Engineer, Oct 2024 – Apr 2025
Leading the Customer Experience team and the front-end platform behind 7 product applications in life insurance and risk assessment. Day to day, that's managing the team, owning Sable and our blueprints, and making front-end architecture decisions with our system architect.
Skip the small talk
I built an AI assistant that knows my background, how I think, and what I've actually built. Ask it anything you'd ask me in a first conversation.
What would you like to know about Andrew?
How does he approach building a design system from scratch?
He starts with the team, not the components. The first question is always who needs to adopt this and what would make them actually use it...
Let's connect
Whether you need leadership driving AI implementation strategy across your organization, or you're scaling your front-end team, improving consistency across products, or building a design system that teams actually adopt - that's exactly the kind of problem I enjoy solving.