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About Me

Hey, I’m Jorell!

Born and raised in Texas, my design journey started in a high school digital media class when I picked up Photoshop and couldn’t put it down. Now I’m in New York City at American Express, building integrated risk management products, focused on delivering data to many consumers across the enterprise, developing GenAI-powered regulation tools for compliance, and designing experiences for new ServiceNow IRM users.

Outside of work: cooking, RPGs (Pokémon, Undertale, Mother 3), road trips, Target runs, late-night conversations with friends, and ambient music on repeat.

Jorell Padilla
01 Where it started

My design journey started in a high school digital media class when I picked up Photoshop for the first time. I had no idea what I was doing, but I couldn’t stop. Something about being able to make something out of nothing on a screen just clicked for me.

I went on to study Computer Science at the University of Houston, graduating in December 2024. The technical foundation helped, but what I kept coming back to was the design side — how you make something not just functional, but intuitive, and maybe even delightful.

02 The CougarCS era

Early in college I became VP of Marketing at CougarCS, the largest CS organization at the University of Houston. The brand was outdated, engagement was declining, and the club didn’t look like the professional community it was trying to be.

I did a full rebrand — logos, color system, website, social assets, motion graphics, merch. The new identity helped attract major sponsors and reignited the energy around the organization. It was also just genuinely fun. Sometimes the best design work is the kind where someone immediately gets it.

03 Learning at PwC

Over two summers, I interned at PwC in back-to-back roles. In 2023, I joined as a Product Development Intern, redesigning a non-profit career mentorship platform to help underserved students access career resources. I used data to understand how people were actually using the product, and let that drive every design decision.

In 2024, I came back as a Product Design Intern and led the design of an AI Assistant for PwC’s tax platform — helping engagement teams spend less time on busywork and more on the work that actually requires their expertise. The product shipped to tens of thousands of tax professionals globally. That summer taught me how to hold my own in a room full of stakeholders, and that showing imperfect work early is almost always the right call.

04 Building Resumes.fyi

In my last semester of college, I teamed up with five friends to build something I genuinely needed myself. We were all job hunting and frustrated by the same thing: nobody really knows what a resume that gets you past the screen actually looks like. So we built Resumes.fyi — a crowdsourced platform where people who got callbacks at top tech companies could share the resumes that landed them there.

I was the only designer. I built the brand from scratch, designed every screen, ran the user research, and iterated constantly — all while finishing my degree. Six months after launch, the platform was acquired by Exponent. That project changed how I think about shipping: get something into people’s hands fast, then listen hard.

05 Now at Amex

Since early 2025, I’ve been in New York City as an Associate Product Manager at American Express, leading the migration of the firm’s integrated risk management infrastructure to a modern platform. The work sits at the intersection of data architecture, cross-functional alignment, and product strategy — making sure that risk teams across the entire organization have what they need to do their jobs well.

It’s complex, high-stakes work, and I genuinely love it. The challenge is always the same: take something complicated and make it feel approachable — whether that’s a landing page, a data model, or a room full of stakeholders who all want different things.

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