Gragera

I’m Alberto Gragera, an engineering manager and builder. This is where I write about engineering management, building teams, technology, and whatever else I find worth sharing.

I’m a Senior Engineering Manager at RevenueCat, based in Madrid, where I lead the Data Insights team behind the client-side analytics, experimentation and attribution platforms.

Before that I managed engineering teams at Google, on YouTube Movies & Shows, and at WhatsApp Business. Earlier I was Head of Engineering at Cabify across the rider, driver and community verticals, co-founded Karumi, a small and heavily specialized development studio, and spent several years at Tuenti leading the frontend framework and product teams back when it was the largest site in Spain.

On remote

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 10:43:00 +0000

Remote is here to stay , there is no question about that.

It opens the market for people that for any given reason can not or don’t want to move to a particular location, and it enables companies to access talent worldwide.

1Commutes are generally terrible, specially in areas where most of the jobs are, and folks want to spend that time doing other things. Offices can be productivity sinks, with a lot of noise and distractions. Remote work is a perfect solution for folks that fall under these buckets.

Bye WhatsApp

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:45:03 +0000

June 1st was my last day at WhatsApp. After roughly nine months I decided to leave the company and find new challenges.

Despite being a world-class organization where I had the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals, there were some things that were not the right fit for me:

Relocation to London: I had to relocate to the UK for tax purposes in the middle of a global pandemic. Then the country completely shut down for nearly five months, which let’s say did not do wonders for me and my family wellbeing.
Split by technology rather than product vertical: I was supporting three platform teams, that were running a bunch of projects at the same time. This approach had a lot of communication and sync overhead, and it was causing me to drift away from product and tech. This resulted in me doing a lot of work that I was able to do, but did not enjoy at all.

Hello Google!

I wanted something different, possibly outside the UK. I reached out to one of my HR contacts at Google and talk about the possibility of joining. The process was quite streamlined and I could not be more excited to join Youtube in Zurich by mid July!

Landing a job at Facebook

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 08:32:53 +0000

How I prepared for the interviews at Facebook and Google and got the offers.

Elastic teams

Tue, 05 May 2020 22:27:57 +0000

I worked at a pretty big social network in Spain from 2009 to 2013. Tuenti peaked at roughly 16 million users and 25 billion page views a month, which was pretty insane back in the day. We made it to the Google Zeitgeist for a couple of years, and in 2011 it was estimated that 15% of the internet traffic of Spain was through Tuenti, more than Google and Facebook combined.

About me

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 20:24:05 +0000

Hi! I am Alberto Gragera, an engineering manager based in Zurich currently working at Google.

Before Google I worked at WhatsApp, Karumi (a small consultancy company that I co-founded) and Tuenti (the biggest Spanish social network ever). I started coding at 12, building forums and websites for fun, and never stopped.

I care deeply about how teams work — the dynamics, the culture, the systems that make collaboration either soar or sink. Most of what I write here reflects that.