Team
Everyone you'll
actually meet.
Leadership
Adam Yusufzai
Co-founder, Engineering
Brisbane
Adam started his career building trading systems at a mid-sized bank in Karachi, then spent five years at Mercury leading infra for their business banking product. He co-founded Cilantrobyte in 2018 because he missed being close to the engineering.
He spends most of his time now on architecture reviews, hiring, and the two or three engagements every quarter that need a senior engineer on the tools. If you catch him on a good day he will argue with you about Postgres extensions.
Previously
- Mercury
- HBL
- Stripe (advisor)
Hana Park
Co-founder, Design
Lahore
Hana was a senior designer at Pentagram in New York, then led product design at Pitch before leaving to co-found Cilantrobyte. Her work sits at the intersection of brand identity and product design — the kind of interfaces that do not apologise for being beautiful.
She owns design direction at the studio and personally leads our hardest brand-heavy engagements. Outside work she writes a sporadic newsletter about editorial typography.
Previously
- Pitch
- Pentagram
- Wolff Olins
Engineering
Mateo Salas
Principal Engineer
Mateo spent a decade on distributed systems — two years at Stripe, four at Airtable — before joining Cilantrobyte in 2021. He maintains four open source libraries and reviews more pull requests than anyone else at the studio.
Most of our hardest backend work lands on his desk. He has strong opinions about Postgres, quiet opinions about Kubernetes, and one well-documented opinion about tabs versus spaces.
Remote
- Stripe
- Airtable
- Turbot
Theo Whitfield
Engineering Lead
Theo has shipped iOS apps at Citymapper, Deliveroo, and Otto. He led our mobile practice since 2022 and wrote most of the internal tooling we now use across mobile engagements.
If your problem involves offline sync, push notifications at scale, or the politics of App Store review, he has probably already solved it twice.
Brisbane
- Citymapper
- Deliveroo
- Otto Mobility
Design
Yara Bittar
Design Director
Yara led product design at Linear for six years before joining us in 2023. She thinks about type the way engineers think about data structures — as the substrate everything else is built on.
She owns our design system and leads design on most of our complex product engagements. If you see obsessive attention to vertical rhythm in our work, that is her.
Brisbane
- Linear
- Airbnb
- Instrument
Strategy
Ines Tanaka
Product Strategist
Ines spent five years at McKinsey in the technology practice, then pivoted into product management at two growth-stage fintechs before joining Cilantrobyte. She leads our discovery sprints and owns the strategic framing on most engagements.
She is the person we deploy when a client's CEO needs to be in the room. She is also the person who tells us when we are wrong about a project and need to reset.
Lahore
- McKinsey
- Ramp
- Brex