Darius Parsa is a staff product designer, an unofficial historical linguist, and a persistent reader of medieval and late antiquity texts. He studied product and transportation design, which is how he ended up designing for autonomous machines that move on their own.

Over the past nine years Darius has designed end to end at Gatik AI, Amazon Web Services, Think Round, Mody Data Solutions, and CUT VR, twice as the founding designer. He has spent that career on one problem: human–autonomy interaction, the layer where a machine’s behavior becomes something a person can read, trust, and take back control of. At Gatik he was the founding designer on the largest driver-out freight network in the United States, owning the interaction model, the research, and the design system across remote supervision, simulation, and field operations work that moved safe operator span of control from four trucks to fifteen.

He also mentors through ADPList and Designlab and was named one of ADPList’s Top 100 design mentors, mostly working with designers trying to move into AI and robotics.