Haya Odeh

Co-Founder & VP of Design Replit

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Haya Odeh is one of three co-founders of Replit and the person responsible for how it feels to use. That is a larger job than it sounds at a company whose product is software development itself: most of Replit’s users are not professional programmers, and the platform’s central bet is that they should not have to become one. Odeh’s design work is where that bet is actually made — down to the level of individual words, as when she replaced “deploy” with “publish” so that the interface did not quietly require its users to speak the language of engineers. She trained as a graphic designer in Jordan, came to interface design through a single introductory course, designed Replit’s logo and first interface before there was a company around it, and has since built its design organisation from one person to a team of nine.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder of Replit, incorporated in 2016 alongside Amjad Masad and Faris Masad, and now headquartered in Foster City, California.
• VP of Design, having designed the logo and the user interface of the platform’s first version.
• Grew the design function from herself alone to eight product designers — three focused on UX and research, four more technical — plus a brand designer, working with design engineers seconded from product engineering.
• Selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur by Endeavor Jordan in March 2026 with Amjad Masad; the selection was Endeavor’s first unicorn from Jordan and its hundredth unicorn globally.
• Honoree in the ASU+GSV Summit’s Power of Women list, 2024.
• Describes her practice as experience design rather than visual design, oriented around clarity, trust, and reconciling what users need with what the business needs.

Professional Journey

Odeh was born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, drawn to colour and form early enough that she remembers it as a childhood preoccupation rather than a choice. She studied graphic design and fine arts at Al-Ahliyya Amman University — foundational work across drawing, light and shadow, typography, calligraphy, architecture and interiors, alongside the beginnings of interface and web design — and was, by her own account, shaped by the impressionists in the process. What she took from that training was less a visual style than a conviction about the relationship between design and the psyche, design as a language rather than a decoration.

After graduating she worked on magazines and newspapers, designing advertisements and print layouts. Secondary accounts add studio work in Amman and freelance engagements including the Clinton Foundation and the consultancy Organic, though attempts to trace those client names to a source that actually states them were unsuccessful, and they should be treated as unconfirmed. She moved from print into website redesign, and then to New York.

The pivot to interface design came through a single “Introduction to UI/UX” course at General Assembly, which she describes as the moment the direction of her career changed. By then she had met Amjad Masad, now Replit’s chief executive and her husband, and she designed the logo and the interface for the first version of what became Replit. She followed him to New York and became a co-founder and VP of Design of the company incorporated in 2016.

The scale of what that design work now touches is unusual. Replit has grown into one of the most heavily used software-creation platforms in the world, with tens of millions of users and millions of applications built on it, and with the arrival of AI-assisted coding its user base has shifted further away from professional developers. Odeh’s design decisions govern whether a person with no engineering vocabulary can get from an idea to something that runs — hence the deliberate substitution of “publish” for “deploy”, a change of one word that removes an entire conceptual prerequisite. She has built out a design organisation to match, now around nine people spanning UX research, technical product design and brand, supplemented by design engineers drawn from the product engineering group.

In March 2026 Endeavor Jordan selected her and Amjad Masad as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, through the network’s peer-vote model. It was Endeavor’s first unicorn selection from Jordan and the hundredth unicorn in the network worldwide. Two years earlier the ASU+GSV Summit had named her to its Power of Women list.

Education

Al-Ahliyya Amman University

Graphic Design and Fine Arts

General Assembly

Introduction to UI/UX