Work

Currently at Vercel, building community systems + experiences. Before that I sat in small, fast-moving engineering teams helping early stage startups build their products: most recently a founding senior frontend engineer at ChaseLabs and frontend engineer at Outverse and HiPeople.

What people I've worked with have said Strengths and superpowers

Vercel

DX / Community Engineer 2026 → now

I joined the Engineering org as a DX Engineer, later moving to Marketing as a Community Engineer. I've helped build the community platform and the systems behind Vercel's global community programs.

My work spans three areas: Engineering, Developer Relations and Community, from building the community platform and the systems behind it to spending time with devs and builders online and IRL.

Engineering

CommunityOps

Built CommunityOps, an internal Slack agent using eve to improve and streamline our community operations.

Hackathon platform

I helped plan and build the Vercel Hackathon platform, which powered the submissions for our global hackathons like Zero to Agent. We used it to accept entries from more than 40 countries, giving builders one place to submit their work and the team one place to review entries for judging and reporting. Reusable infrastructure now means future hackathons don't need one-off landing pages or submission systems!

Community Platform Events Area Redesign

Redesigned the Community Platform Events Area

Community Platform Meetups Area

Designed and built a map and globe view for meetups

Developer Relations

Svelte & Nuxt on Vercel

I started a framework awareness initiative to introduce more people to the teams behind Svelte and Nuxt and what they've been shipping. I planned and hosted live sessions with the core team members themselves, and paired each session with their respective Vercel Academy course launch.

Speaking + developer education

Various speaker opportunities, educating our community in person.

Talk @ Vercel Skills Night London
Maya Avendaño on stage at Vercel Skills Night London presenting You Can Just Ship Things
"...and this is your friendly reminder, you can just ship things." :)
Talk @ Encode AI Conf London - "You can just ship things"

Community

Vercel IRL program

I lead the Vercel IRL and Superhosts programs, supporting our community hosts and partners running meetups and hackathons around the world.

Global hackathon programs

I supported our global hackathon programs, from organising Prompt to Production London in seven days to supporting Zero to Agent hosts and helping judge entries. Zero to Agent reached 8,000 builders across more than 40 countries, with 136 community hosts and over 90 events.

The Intercom x Vercel Prompt to Production hackathon team, February 2026

Community Events

I lead Vercel's community events in the UK and played a major role in planning the Ship London event series. Across the events, I owned or supported event planning, outreach, attendee management, staffing, vendors, community partners, MCing and day-of operations + problem solving.

Workflows London

I led local execution for the London stop of the Workflows World Tour which celebrated our GA launch. I owned attendee management, staffing, media, day-of venue coordination and MCing. I learned the technical content on a short timeline, taught the workshop and shared our latest community platform ships.

Maya speaking into a microphone at Workflows London, laptop covered in stickers on the table
Built in London

Our largest UK hackathon we've ran yet, in partnership with OpenAI, Supabase, Auth0, and ElevenLabs. I helped plan the event beforehand including logistics, I was the main point of contact on the day, MC'd, coordinating staffing, hacker support, community judges, managed judging, vendors, swag, platform setup and follow-up. It drew 1,500+ registrations and a 1,000+ person waitlist.

Day Zero

A huge developer party the night before Ship LDN. I sourced and coordinated our eight London community partners (with a collective community size of around 11,000 people!), organised staffing and hosted the partner lightning talks with speakers from Vercel, Cursor, Auth0 and Sentry.

Ship London

Vercel's flagship conference. I supported on-the-ground social content, interviews and editing during the event.

Ship London community group
Next.js Night

Our Next.js community night where some of the team themselves came and shared what's new! I helped plan the venue, vendors, swag and promotion, then acted as the event point of contact and MC'd.

Community Support

I supported developers across community channels with issues and during incidents, and surfaced product issues and feedback to internal teams.

Supporting a developer at a community hackathon, working together at a table with a laptop

ChaseLabs

Senior Frontend Engineer 2025

I joined ChaseLabs as their founding frontend engineer as engineer #2 / employee #5.

I helped take them from a backend only system and several manual workflows to the first product, serving 60+ companies and becoming much more self-service. This lightened the work of the internal team to enable them to scale faster.

I worked across design and engineering, owning major product surfaces from early exploration through design, to implementation and iteration. I collaborated closely with co-founders and users to improve the product, and built the frontend codebase, architecture and interfaces from the ground up, aligning with their existing branding.

This was very 0 → 1 work: figuring out how features should behave, prototyping new ideas, learning unfamiliar technical areas as I went and shipping continuously.

Ships

Built the core product flows and interfaces, such as:

  • Human Intervention, a human-in-the-loop workflow interface with many job types and actions
  • Analytics dashboards and mission control to visualise campaign performance for customers and internal team
  • Contacts management: table heavy areas with CSV uploads, lists, search and export
  • ICP / lead sourcing workflow with a visual query builder
  • Authentication and self-service organisation onboarding flows that went through a couple of redesigns and a billing provider migration
  • Calendar booking page to enable speedier scheduling for prospects

Self-service meeting booking system

Self-service meeting booking system

Self-service domains and mailbox purchase flow prototype

Self-service domains and mailbox purchase flow prototype

Outverse

Frontend Engineer 2023–2025

At Outverse I was one of 3 frontend engineers, in a small engineering team of 5; I got to work on a breadth of interesting interfaces.

As a product, we pivoted a couple of times and went from community forums for software companies, to a platform powering their product docs and knowledge bases with AI powered search and answers, and eventually shifted to customer support agents.

I worked across most of the content editor on various blocks including: callouts, colour highlighting, accordions, tables, mentions, heading links, captions and Markdown export for docs. I got very familiar with Tiptap and custom node views, and for more complex blocks I had to get lower level and write custom ProseMirror commands, marks and serialisers.

Ships

  • Built complex content editor features: for blocks like the table and tabs, there were no existing examples to reference on how to build them with our intended design, so I had to figure it out (pre-coding agents!), and often scoured the internet for a random forum post that would help to give me a breakthrough. There was a surprising amount of complexity in those.
  • Built accessibility primitives such as skip links and raised accessibility quality through code reviews and knowledge sharing
  • Researched and shared Svelte 5 changes with the engineering team and planned for the Svelte 4 to 5 migration
  • Presented technical work internally and gave my first external talks
  • Built the foundational Button components in the design system
  • Built internal tools to improve developer experience for the team, such as a README explorer for docs, an icon catalogue and other helper utils

Text Colour & highlighting

Text colour & highlighting

Custom date range picker

Custom date range picker

Label flows

Label flows

Custom alt text editor

Custom alt text editor
Knowledge sharing in all hands

HiPeople

Software Engineer 2021–2022

I joined HiPeople (a HR Tech product for assessments and reference checks) when the employee count was < 20.

I built user-facing product experiences and helped establish stronger frontend and design-system practices across the team.

I became a go-to person for frontend implementation, working closely with design on new product flows, UI components, Storybook and the design system. I was particularly strong at taking ambiguous product work and giving it structure: breaking down scope, creating visuals to align teams, clarifying requirements and then translating designs into UI.

Ships

  • Built UI for onboarding and role-creation flows
  • Completed a major sidebar redesign, and brought the team along with weekly demos to let them see it taking shape whilst I was building it
  • Expanded and improved our Storybook and shared UI documentation
  • Worked closely with design to translate product concepts into polished frontend components
  • Used FigJam and visual documentation to clarify complex scopes before implementation to get product, design, science and engineering aligned beforehand
  • Helped break down work and create structure around ambiguous projects
  • Improved engineering documentation and internal knowledge sharing
  • Owned the frontend for an embedded third party background check integration, including implementation and partner validation with their team
  • Regularly demoed product work and communicated technical decisions to the wider team

Product visibility and PLG nudges

Siemens

Intern → Graduate → Software Engineer 2017–2021

I started my professional career in the railway industry! I joined Siemens as an engineering intern and left four years later as a software engineer. I worked across rail infrastructure, internal tools and technical education before joining the software team building communication and control software for the Elizabeth line.

Software Engineer

  • Built and maintained communication and control software for the Elizabeth line, implementing interface updates and resolving defects found during testing
  • Worked across software engineering, Human Factors and testing to align the system with operability findings, customer priorities and end-user expectations

Graduate Engineer

  • On the Crossrail project (London's Elizabeth line), I led delivery of a project to improve navigation with an interface update across more than 200 control-system screens, coordinating a team of up to six engineers.
  • Turned Human Factors and end-user findings into delivery plans, work packages and Jira stories, then supported sprint planning, defect triage and supplier coordination
  • Alongside my engineering work, I led STEM volunteering at the Ashby site and represented Siemens at school events, careers fairs, university panels, mock interviews and iRail.
    • I created and ran two-day Future Makers and Tomorrow's Engineers Week programs for groups of 24 and 40 students, covering signalling, micro:bits, MagLev trains, product design, testing and pitching.
    • Through Siemens' work with The Smallpeice Trust, I led a rail challenge with the National College for High Speed Rail for 50 teenagers and gave an Automating Railway Operations session to another 50 students at its annual rail residential.
    • I also researched, designed and tested a rail-engineering STEM tool with KS3 students for my final-year project.
    • Surveys and school testing showed increased confidence and interest in STEM and rail careers, and Siemens Mobility recognised the work with an EDI/STEM Champion award.

Engineering Intern

  • Worked across project management, business development, bids, system delivery, technical field services and education
  • I reworked a maintenance analytics tool used by Technical Field Services, automating a data process that previously took two hours down to around five minutes. I also simplified the workbook, improved its navigation and documented the process. The reports were used in monthly team briefings and displayed across the department.