Meet the Grafana Labs team: Mihaela Maior, senior engineering manager on the Grafana Experience team

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know the team members who are working behind the scenes on the cool stuff you’re using.

Meet Mihaela!

Name Mihaela Minor

What do you do at Grafana Labs?
I am a Senior Engineering Manager on the Grafana Experience team. I work closely with the Observability team and more specifically lead the Logs & Traces and Observability Experience Squads. We are responsible for the Explore page, observability dashboard experience, and e2e observability workflow. This includes a variety of plugins, data source panels, and core Grafana work.

Why did you join Grafana Labs?
I joined Grafana in search of a genuine people-led company. There’s a complete mentality shift when you lead with people in everything you do, and that’s visible here through our focus on autonomy, development-driven roadmaps, and self-driven work assignments.

Where is home for you?
I am based in Manchester, UK, which is currently in the GMT time zone. This makes things really simple when discussing timing with my colleagues. Manchester was named the “Rainy City” for a good reason, so my colleagues often have to listen to my excitement when there’s a clear sky.

“There’s a complete mentality shift when you lead with people in everything you do, and that’s visible here through our focus on autonomy, development-driven roadmaps, and self-driven work assignments.”

What’s a project that you’re really proud to have worked on at Grafana Labs?
I have only worked at Grafana for just over 3 months but I feel I’ve already been part of some exciting initiatives. The most exciting project so far for me is that we are currently experimenting with an approach to restructuring the Observability team. This is a project that’s allowed me to experiment with a more people-focused approach which is exactly what I was after for my personal development. Feedback is very positive so far and it has taught us to be more trustworthy, take more risks, and maintain a high level of flexibility in our culture.

What open source projects do you contribute to?
Grafana is the first open source project I’ve contributed to (apart from OSS projects I’ve used for personal exploratory projects). Due to the nature of my role, I don’t get much time for coding nowadays, but I do love taking part in the Grafana Hackathons, which give me an opportunity to get to know our codebase and contribute to it. My last project was around exploring better ways for bug tracking and troubleshooting for our users—and our team was all women!

What do you like to do in your free time?
First and foremost, I binge watch anything and everything. It started in high school for me where I would binge watch loads of American TV shows, and I literally never stopped. Alongside that, I’ve recently been doing various crafts because just watching TV is not enough to keep my mind engaged. So I have been doing cross-stitching and crocheting for the past couple years in the absence of travel.

So what’s the last thing you binge-watched?

Me and my partner have just finished re-watching ALL of Grey’s Anatomy. That’s 272 hours and 33 minutes of my life I will never get back. In all seriousness, we loved it, and it truly satisfied my need to get invested in a good show. I might be just as good as WebMD now at diagnosing a patient!

What’s your best WFH tip?

Separate your work from family time and spaces. I live with my husband and 2 crazy springers (see below) so we tend to spread around the house as much as possible. I am personally most productive when I’m at my desk, in my small office, where nobody can disrupt me. I still have the flexibility of just popping out or grabbing a snack if I need to, which only comes with remote working, but I can also take advantage of a good routine and get a clean exit from work at the end of the day.

The emoji I overuse is ❤️ because …

I like to spread good vibes and I really appreciate the hard work my team does day in day out. I’m known to use emojis in emails as well (yes, I’m that person) and I find them really helpful to express myself in writing. Keep it professional — and fun. 🙂 

Learn more about the Grafana Labs remote-first team and culture, and find out how you can become an official Grafanista by visiting our careers page.