Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership
A software engineering podcast for senior developers, staff engineers, and tech leads who build and scale systems in production. Hosted by Neciu Dan, it features deep, technical conversations with engineering leaders from companies like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Datadog, and Snyk. Each week, the show unpacks real challenges of frontend architecture, micro frontends, React and Vue at scale, design systems, security, reliability, and technical leadership.
Episodes
Hypermedia at Scale with Carson Gross (HTMX) | REST, HTMX 4, AI
Do you actually need a JavaScript framework to build your web app, or did we forget how the web was designed to work?Carson Gross is the creator of HTMX and its predecessor, intercooler.js, the principal at Big Sky Software, and a computer science professor at Montana State University. HTMX came out around the same time as React, and for years it was the contrarian option. Then the industry starte
Performance at Scale with Ryan Townsend (Cloudflare) | Black Friday, Edge Caching, Cache Hit Ratios
You can't optimize what you don't measure. So why do so many teams still guess?In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Ryan Townsend, Principal Product Manager for Performance at Cloudflare. Ryan has spent 20+ years building for the web and a decade as a CTO. He co-founded Shift Commerce, an enterprise-scale headless SaaS e-commerce platform built on Ruby on Rails that handled
Design Systems at Scale with Szymon Chudy (Netflix) | Hawkins, Paved Roads, AI Migrations
What does it take to run a design system that 2,000+ applications depend on, when every team is free to walk away from it?a Software Engineer on Netflix's Hawkins team, which uses the design systemIn this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan sits down with Szymon Chudy, Software Engineer at Netflix on the Hawkins team, the design system used by thousands of engineers across Netflix's internal t
Agentic Systems at Scale with Vilva Athiban (Omio) | MCP, Orchestration Agents, LLM Cost Optimization
What does an agentic AI system look like when it has to work 100% of the time for millions of travelers, not just in a demo?Vilva Athiban is Lead AI Engineer at Omio, one of Europe's leading travel platforms. In June 2024, Omio picked him and one other engineer to start an AI team reporting directly to the CEO and CTO. He had no ML background. All he knew was how to call an LLM API. Since then
Decentralized Social Media at Scale with Dan Abramov (Vercel) | AT Protocol, Bluesky, Redux, React
What if every app's data lived in one shared, open database that no company owns? Dan Abramov says that future already exists, and he spent two years building it.Season 3 of Señors at Scale opens with one of the most recognizable names in frontend. Dan Abramov is the co-creator of Redux, spent nearly a decade on the React core team at Meta, writes overreacted.io, and spent the last couple of y
Accessibility at Scale with Craig Abbott (TetraLogical) | WCAG, Screen Readers, Design Systems
Your product passes every automated accessibility check. Does that mean anyone can actually use it?Craig Abbott is a Principal Accessibility Specialist at TetraLogical and the former Head of Accessibility at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, one of the largest government departments in the country, where he built a dedicated accessibility practice from nothing and open sourced the DWP
Versatility at Scale with Carmen Huidobro (CTO, Incredible Bee) | 17 Years Freelancing, Automation, Ethical AI
Is versatility the skill that actually survives the AI shift?In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Carmen Huidobro, CTO at Incredible Bee in Vienna. Carmen has spent 17 years in tech, almost all of it freelancing, working across Objective-C, Ruby on Rails, the web, mobile, hardware, and even ABAP in an SAP consultancy. Along the way, she spent five years in developer relations and de
CI/CD at Scale with Marko Gaćeša (Semaphore) | Semaphore, Product Engineering, Agent Native
Is testing, not coding, the real bottleneck of the AI era?Marko Gaćeša is Head of Product at Semaphore, the agent native CI/CD platform built for coding agents: fast, affordable, enterprise-ready, and fully open source. A serial entrepreneur and technologist, Marko founded Dry Tools, served as Chief Product Officer at Alchemy Cloud, and has spent his career building high-quality software across do
AI Harness at Scale with Maxim Salnikov (Microsoft) | GitHub Copilot, Agent Ops, Context Engineering
Everyone can buy the same GitHub Copilot licenses. So what actually makes a company AI native?In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Maxim Salnikov, AI Dev Tools Solution Engineer at Microsoft, where he leads AI native development enablement for over 100 enterprise customers of Microsoft and GitHub in Norway. Maxim has been building for the web since the late 90s and now spen
URL State at Scale with François Best | nuqs, React, TypeScript
What if your app's state didn't live in memory, but in the URL?François Best is a freelance web developer, open sourcer, and founder of 47ng, where he builds web applications with a privacy-first approach. He is the creator of nuqs, the type-safe search param state manager for React with over 10,000 GitHub stars, used by companies like Sentry, Supabase, Vercel, and Clerk.In this episode, F
WebMCP at Scale with Susanna Wong (Typeform, Google Developer Expert) | Browser AI, Offline Models, Agents
What happens to frontend engineering when software stops being deterministic?In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Susanna Wong, Staff Software Engineer at Typeform and Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies since 2020. Susanna's path is anything but typical: she studied engineering in the US, spent close to seven years as an architect and computational designer at
Newsletters at Scale with Sebastian Lorber (This Week in React) | RSS Curation, Paid Acquisition, React Server Components
What does it actually take to run one of the biggest newsletters in the React ecosystem, week after week, for over six years?In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Sebastian Lorber, creator of This Week in React, the newsletter read by over 45,000 developers every week, and a core maintainer of Docusaurus at Meta. Sebastian has worked with React since late 2013, spent years a
Monorepos at Scale with Santosh Yadav (Principal DevRel, CodeRabbit) | Nx, Module Federation, AI Code Review
Poly repos were good when we needed separation. But in the age of AI, do we still need it? Santosh Yadav doesn't think so.In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Santosh Yadav, Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, Google Developer Expert for Angular, GitHub Star, Nx Champion, and Microsoft MVP. Santosh has spent years deep in the monorepo world, including leading the move to
Routing at Scale with TanStack Router's Nicolas Beaussart | React Router Migration, Monorepos, PayFit
What do you do when React Router v5 is blocking your React 18 upgrade, your frontend spans 25 repos, and you have 5 different micro frontend strategies running in the same app?In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Nicolas Beaussart-Hatchuel, Staff Engineer at PayFit and maintainer of TanStack Router. Nicolas shares the full story of migrating a 1.5 million-line codebase from
Redux at Scale with Mark Erikson | State Management, RTK Query, Time Travel Debugging
What happens when the person maintaining one of the most widely used libraries on the internet tells you AI is coming for debugging, too?Mark Erikson is the maintainer of Redux, creator of Redux Toolkit, and a senior front-end engineer at Replay.io, where he works on a time-traveling debugger. He's been shipping software since 2008, from emulating legacy CPUs in old aircraft at Northrop Grumma
TanStack Query at Scale with Dominik Dorfmeister (TkDodo) | Open Source, Knip, Sentry Design System
What does it actually feel like to maintain a library used by millions of developers every day?In this episode of Seniors at Scale, Dan sits down with Dominik Dorfmeister, better known as TkDodo, the creator and maintainer of TanStack Query and a software engineer at Sentry. Dominik has spent over a decade building frontend tooling and has become one of the most trusted voices in the React and Typ
Performance Engineering at Canva with Den Odell (Staff Engineer & Manning Author)
What happens to "edge cases" when your product serves 250 million people every month?In this episode of Señors at Scale, I'm joined by Den Odell, Staff Software Engineer at Canva and author of "Performance Engineering in Practice" (Manning, 2026). Den works on Canva's Pro Design group, building inside one of the largest React/TypeScript codebases on the planet, serving
Frontend at Meta with Evyatar Alush | Hack, Flow, Sapling, Open Source at Scale
What does engineering at Meta actually look like from the inside? Spoiler: almost nothing you know from outside applies.In this episode, Dan sits down with Evyatar Alush, Software Engineer at Meta in Tel Aviv and the creator of EmojiPicker React (600K+ weekly downloads) and Vest. Evyatar's journey is one of the most unusual on the show: no degree, no high school diploma, learned JavaScript on
React Native at Scale with Kadi Kraman, Software Developer at Expo | Mobile Development, EAS, OTA Updates
What does it actually take to build production React Native apps in 2026, and where does Expo fit in?In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan sits down with Kadi Kraman, software developer at Expo, who has spent over six years in the React Native ecosystem, wearing every hat from IC to director. Kadi shares the story of how she went from writing C++ in a maths degree to becoming one of the early Re
AI at Scale with Nico Martin from Hugging Face | Transformers.js, Tokenizers, On-Device Inference
Can you really run state-of-the-art machine learning models directly in the browser, with no server, no API calls, and full privacy by default?In this episode, Nico Martin, Open Source Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face and Google Developer Expert in AI and Web Technologies, walks through how Transformers.js makes on-device AI a reality. Nico's journey is anything but conventional. He s
Scaling Frontend at Perk with Giorgio Polvara | Monolith to Microfrontends, Vite, Zod
What does it actually take to scale a frontend from 15 people in a converted flat to a 1,800-person unicorn, and then migrate the whole thing to microfrontends without breaking anyone's week?In this episode, Dan sits down with Giorgio Polvara, Staff Engineer at Perk (formerly TravelPerk) and the original creator of @testing-library/user-event (1M+ weekly npm downloads). Giorgio joined TravelPe
Federated Systems at Scale with Zephyr Cloud | Module Federation, Edge Deploys, Reverse Tree Shaking
How do you deploy federated front ends to the edge in 150 milliseconds? In this episode, Zack Chapple, CEO and Co-founder of Zephyr Cloud, and Nestor Lopez, Platform Engineer at Zephyr Cloud, break down everything developers need to know about micro frontends, module federation, and deploying at global scale without the infrastructure pain.Zack's journey started at a consulting company working
ServiceMesh at Scale with William Morgan, creator of Linkerd
William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant and the creator of Linkerd, the world's first service mesh and a CNCF graduated project powering production Kubernetes infrastructure at thousands of companies. Before founding Buoyant, William spent nearly four years at Twitter as a software engineer and engineering manager, where he shipped core platform features like the Twitter photo service and embed t
Databases at Scale with Tyler Benfield (Staff Engineer @ Prisma) | ORMs, Indexes, Connection Pooling & Scaling Postgres to Billions of Requests
You can never build anything faster than your slowest database query. In this episode, Tyler Benfield, Staff Software Engineer at Prisma, breaks down everything developers need to know about database performance, from why your queries are slow to how Prisma scales Postgres to handle billions of requests on bare metal infrastructure.Tyler's path into databases started at Penske Racing, writing
Open Source at Scale with Corbin Crutchley (TanStack Form & VP of Engineering)
TanStack Form gets over a million downloads per week. Corbin Crutchley is the person behind it. But this conversation goes way beyond forms and frameworks.Corbin started coding professionally at 16, worked minimum wage at a charter school, taught himself Angular through sheer persistence, and eventually became a GitHub Star, Microsoft MVP, author of The Framework Field Guide, and VP of Engineering
CSS Tooling, Plugin Ecosystems & Open Source Values at Scale with Andrey Sitnik (Author of PostCSS)
What happens when one developer's tools account for 0.7% of all NPM downloads? In this episode, Andrey Sitnik, creator of PostCSS, Autoprefixer, and Browserlist, and lead engineer at Evil Martians, shares the full story behind the CSS tools that millions of developers depend on every day.From writing PostCSS in CoffeeScript to architecting its event-based plugin system in version 8, Andrey wal
React, Next.js & Server Components at Scale with Aurora Scharff (DX Engineer at Vercel)
What does a robotics graduate, a Microsoft MVP, and a Vercel DX Engineer have in common? They're all Aurora Scharff, and she's on a mission to change how developers think about React.In this episode, Aurora takes us through her unconventional path from studying Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Oslo to becoming one of the most active voices in the React community. From
DevRel at Scale: Measuring Impact, Developer Experience & Staying Technical | Daniel Afonso
What does it actually take to be a developer advocate? And how do you measure the impact of developer relations when everyone seems to disagree on the metrics?In this episode, Daniel Afonso, Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty, walks us through his journey from writing prank bash scripts as a 10-year-old in Portugal to becoming one of the most active voices in the European DevRel community. Dan
Scaling Engineering Organizations with Lucian Popovici (From 0 to 700 at Deloitte Digital)
How do you build an engineering organization from zero to 700 professionals? What happens when your biggest leadership lesson comes from a broken leg and a Border Collie?In this episode of Senors @ Scale, I sit down with Lucian Popovici, a force multiplier in tech leadership with 20+ years of experience scaling engineering organizations at Ericsson, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte Digital. Lucian is t
Technical Leadership at Scale with Anemari Fiser (O’Reilly Author and Engineering Coach)
What makes a great tech lead? It's not just technical chops—it's the soft skills that scale your impact beyond your own keyboard.In this episode, I sit down with Anemari Fiser, an engineering leader, O'Reilly author, and coach who's spent over a decade helping engineers make the leap from individual contributor to technical leader. Anemari has led teams at ThoughtWorks through massive transformati
MicroFrontends at Scale with Florian Rappl (author of "The Art of Micro Frontends" & Piral creator)
MicroFrontends at Scale with Florian Rappl | The Art of Modular ArchitectureWhat if you could build web applications where teams could deploy independently without breaking each other's code? In this episode, we sit down with Florian Rappl—author of "The Art of Micro Frontends," creator of the Piral framework, and Microsoft MVP—to explore how micro frontends are transforming how we b
Nuxt at Scale with Daniel Roe
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Daniel Roe, leader of the Nuxt Core team at Vercel, for an in-depth conversation about building and scaling with Nuxt, Vue's most powerful meta-framework.Daniel shares his journey from the Laravel world into Vue and Nuxt, revealing how he went from being a user to becoming the lead maintainer of one of the most important frameworks in the J
State Management at Scale with Daishi Kato (Author of Zustand)
In this episode of Seniors at Scale, host Dan Neciu dives deep into the world of state management with Daishi Kato, the prolific open-source author and maintainer behind three of the most widely used libraries in modern React: Zustand, Jotai, and Valtio. Daishi also shares insights into his new project, Waku, a framework built around React Server Components.Daishi has spent nearly a decade buildin
Domain Driven Design at Scale with Vlad Khononov (O'Reilly and Pearson Author)
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Vlad Kononov, software architect, keynote speaker, and author of Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design.Vlad has spent more than twenty years helping teams untangle legacy systems, rebuild failing architectures, and bring clarity to messy business domains. His work spans greenfield systems, enterprise refactors,
Modern CSS at Scale with Bramus (Chrome Developer Relations Engineer ,CSS and Web UI, at Google)
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Bramus Van Damme, Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google, and one of the driving forces behind View Transitions, Scroll-Driven Animations, Anchor Positioning, and CSS Custom Functions.Bramus brings a rare perspective from inside the browser engine itself. From helping shape CSS specs at the standards level to building the demos and tooli
Security at Scale with Liran Tal - Director of Developer Advocacy at Snyk
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Liran Tal, Director of Developer Advocacy at Snyk, GitHub Star, and one of the most influential voices in modern application security. Liran has spent decades at the intersection of open-source ecosystems, Node.js, supply chain security, and now AI agent security, helping developers ship fast without exposing themselves to silent, catastrophic
Micro Frontends at Scale with Luca Mezzalira (O’Reilly Author and Principal Architect at AWS)
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Luca Mezzalira, Principal Serverless Specialist at AWS and author of Building Micro-Frontends, for a deep and highly practical look at scaling frontend architectures for hundreds of developers.Luca shares the real story behind how micro-frontends were born — from his early experiments at DAZN trying to scale a live sports platform across 40 dev
Design System at Scale with Stefano Magni, Tech Lead at Preply
🎙 About the Podcast:Join host Neciu Dan as he sits down with Stefano Magni, a senior front-end engineer and tech lead at Preply, to explore the intricacies of building a robust design system and the journey of working in public. Stefano shares his insights on the importance of skills, reputation, and networking in shaping a successful career. Discover how his experiences from building Flash mini-g
Reliability at Scale – With Bruno Paulino (N26)
🎙 About the Podcast:Señors @ Scale is a no-fluff engineering podcast hosted by Neciu Dan — diving into the real-world chaos of scaling systems, teams, and yourself. From production bugs to platform bets, we sit down with senior engineers to discuss the scars, strategies, and lessons that truly matter.In this episode, host Neciu Dan sits down with Bruno Paulino, Tech Lead at N26, to unpack how reli
MicroFrontend at Scale with Igor (Director of Engineering at Cloudflare, co-creator of Angular) and Natalia (Principal Product Manager at Microsoft)
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan chats with Natalia Venditto, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, and Igor Minar, Senior Director of Engineering at Cloudflare and co-creator of Angular, about WebFragments — a radical new approach to micro-frontends that rethinks how we build for the web.Natalia and Igor share how WebFragments was born from years of pain with module federation and brittle
Observability at Scale with Erik Grijzen, Principal Software Engineer at New Relic
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Erik Grijzen, Principal Software Engineer at New Relic, joins Dan to share his journey from web designer to principal architect and what it really takes to scale UI development across dozens of teams. Erik walks us through how New Relic built one of the first large-scale micro-frontend architectures before the term even existed, designing tooling that lets teams
Accessibility at Scale with Kateryna Porshnieva, Engineering at Buffer
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Kateryna Porchienova, Senior Engineering Manager at Buffer, joins Dan to talk about her journey into programming, the craft of UI animation, and why accessibility should be a standard — not an afterthought.Kateryna shares how her very first app, built in high school, ended up helping children with disabilities learn from home — sparking a lifelong commitment to i
Rails at Scale with Adrian Marin founder of AVO
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Adrian Marin, founder of AVO and host of FriendlyRB, joins Dan to share his journey into programming and his deep commitment to the Ruby ecosystem.Adrian walks us through his transition from a non-technical background into software development and how he fell in love with Ruby on Rails for its elegance and productivity. He explains why everything in Ruby is an ob
Vue at Scale with Andreas Panopoulos
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Andreas Panopoulos — Staff Software Engineer at Hack the Box and co-organizer of Vue.js Athens — joins Dan to share his journey from building jQuery landing pages to leading frontend teams powered by Vue.Andreas walks us through the evolution of Vue.js, from version 2 to 3, and how features like the Composition API and TypeScript support transformed developer exp
Frontend Architecture at Scale with Faris Aziz
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Faris Aziz — Staff Front-End Engineer at Small PDF, international speaker, and co-founder of ZurichJS — joins Dan to talk about scaling both frontend architecture and engineering culture.Faris shares his unconventional journey from CrossFit trainer to software engineer, and how personal projects became his gateway into tech. He opens up about the realities of wor
Organising Conferences at Scale with Aris, founder of CityJS
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Aris — founder of CityJS and longtime community builder — joins Dan to talk about the journey from small local meetups to organizing one of the fastest-growing global JavaScript conferences.Aris shares his unlikely path into programming, starting as a basketball-loving student in Greece with no computer at home, to innovating on the job with early Java projects,
Open Source at Scale with Erik Rasmussen
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Eric Rasmussen — creator of Redux Form and React Final Form, now Principal Product Engineer at Attio — joins Dan to talk about building open source at scale, developer experience, and the lessons learned from two decades of shipping frontend software.Eric shares his journey from early experiments with BASIC and FoxPro to designing Attio’s secure SDK ecosystem, wh
Mentorship at Scale with Eduardo Aparicio Cardenas
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Front-End Engineer and ADPList Top 100 Mentor Eduardo Aparicio-Cardenas joins Dan to talk about mentorship, career growth, and leadership at scale — from debugging real-world performance issues to guiding engineers through promotions and burnout.Eduardo shares lessons from 15+ years building web products, why perception often matters more than output for promotio
React at Scale with Matheus Albuquerque
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Staff Frontend Engineer Matheus Albuquerque joins Dan to talk all things React, rendering, and real-world performance at scale.They dive into React scheduling and fibers, why rendering strategies always “depend,” and how to make performance decisions when millions of users are at stake. Mateusz shares war stories about dropdowns with 16,000 options, migrating a s
Refactoring at Scale with Jose Calderon
In this engaging conversation, Jose Calderon, a lead software engineer at JP Morgan Chase, shares his journey into software engineering, his passion for Java and the Spring ecosystem, and the importance of documentation and decision-making in software architecture. He discusses the evolving role of AI in coding, offers tips for learning Java, and emphasizes the significance of mentoring future eng
Pragmatism at Scale with Tudor Barbu
🎙️ In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Principal Engineer Tudor Barbu (ex-Personio, Skyscanner) shares two decades of software engineering lessons — from hacking on cassette-based machines to leading platform efforts in modern frontend teams.We talk debugging horror stories, the evolution of tech roles post-pandemic, and the shift from chasing technical perfection to delivering user value. Tudor br
Interviewing at Scale with Angel Paredes
SummaryIn this conversation, Angel Paredes, an engineering manager at Datadog, shares his journey from being a student with a passion for art to becoming a successful engineer and manager in the tech industry. He discusses the differences between the tech environments in Madrid and Barcelona, his transition to engineering management, and the importance of team dynamics and leadership. Angel also d
Performance at Scale - With Danilo Velasquez
In this kickoff episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Danilo Velasquez — Staff Engineer at Adevinta and longtime frontend performance obsessive. They unpack the real battles behind Web Vitals, micro frontends, and the growing complexity of modern frontend work.Danilo shares war stories like:Supporting Internet Explorer 6 in production (yes, really)Building a homegrown Lighthouse
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