Current Chapter Grafana: 4 years total Amsterdam, NL

Alexandra Vargas

Staff Software Engineer • 4+ years at Grafana: 2 building, 2 leading in Dashboards, now building collaboration features at Sharing Squad

✏️ core beliefs 
// Core philosophy
const me = {
  philosophy: "See the human first, then the developer",
  approach: "Care about users, work with available tools"
};

Career Chapters

Key moments that shaped my growth—this one captures moving from tech lead to staff engineer role.

📍 Current: Staff Engineer Era (June 2025) 📝 Future: Early Grafana Growth (2021-2023)

Current Chapter: Staff Engineer Era

Just completed 2 years as tech lead of Dashboards Squad, now working on collaboration features at Sharing Squad (June 2025)

Tech Lead Era: Dashboards Squad (June 2023 - June 2025)

Led Schema V2 Project

Led Schema V2 project—basically making it possible to have a new dashboard schema that enables creating dashboards with code instead of clicking around, plus dynamic dashboards. Turns out this was something our Grafana users wanted for a long time.

Project Leadership API Design DevEx

Major Contributor to Scenes Migration

Key contributor in 12-person team migrating Grafana's entire dashboard runtime to Scenes library. 18-month project serving 2M+ users. Read my technical deep-dive on the architecture and challenges.

React TypeScript Large-Scale Migration

Accessibility Mindset

Started the accessibility working group years ago, stepped back from group leadership, but accessibility thinking stuck. Philosophy in action: this portfolio has semantic HTML, ARIA labels, skip links—because good code works for everyone.

Inclusive Design A11y Thinking User-First Code

Current Focus: Sharing Squad (June 2025+)

Helping Users Collaborate

After 2 years as tech lead at Dashboards Squad, I'm now working as a staff engineer at Sharing Squad. Using my frontend architecture and team experience to build features that help users work together better with Grafana.

Staff Engineer User Collaboration Individual Contributor

Previous Chapters

📖

Early Grafana Growth (2021-2023)

Foundation building years - shipping features, starting the accessibility working group, automating tedious stuff, and figuring out how to work with big enterprise customers. Growing from individual contributor to someone ready to lead.

Read full chapter →

My Approach

How marathon training, visual thinking, and cross-cultural perspective shape staff-level frontend work

↗ life → code connections

Core Principles: How Life Experience Shapes Technical Work

Sustainable Technical Impact

Training for my first marathon in 2025. Long runs teach you about sustainable pace: you can't sprint the whole way. Same with technical work—consistent progress beats heroic all-nighters.

Marathon Training Sustainable Pace Long-term Impact

Visual Problem Solving

Learning to draw forces you to really see what's actually there, not what you think is there. That kind of attention reveals problems that pure code review misses—accessibility barriers, user flow issues, the gap between what we built and what people need.

Visual Thinking Attention to Detail UX Awareness

Global-First Engineering

Colombia to Netherlands shaped my perspective. Different contexts, same human needs. I build solutions that work across cultures, time zones, and accessibility requirements—not just for users like me.

Global Perspective Inclusive Design Cross-Cultural
"

Every line of frontend code affects a human. I code for the person behind the screen, not just the screen itself.

→ philosophy in practice

How I See Tech

Tech as Problem-Solving Medium

Tech is a medium to solve problems, not an end in itself. I don't code because I can—I code because someone needs a problem solved. Learning how to draw is teaching me to see what's actually there, running is teaching me sustainable pace over time, and a lot of things I do outside of code help me approach technical problems differently.

Human-Centered Problem-First Holistic Thinking 
     ┌─────────────┐
     │ users ←→ code │
     │     ↕       │
     │ human ←→ tech │
     │     ↕       │
     │ staff ←→ team │
     └─────────────┘
Staff-level interconnections

Connect

Love connecting with people solving interesting problems. Always curious about different approaches to building software and working in teams

Technical Conversations

Software architecture decisions, making things accessible to everyone, building tools that developers actually want to use, or how teams can work better together

Teaching & Learning

Mentoring programs, architecture discussions, speaking at conferences, open source collaboration, or sharing lessons from large-scale frontend migrations. Recently discussed tech career progression on Beyond Coding podcast.

Amsterdam Tech Community

Local frontend meetups, accessibility advocacy, marathon training routes, or just good technical conversations over coffee