# Alejandro García Salas > Software Engineer Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/alejandrogarcasalas https://portfolio.alejandro.pe/ versatile, design-minded builder/hacker with experience across startups and large companies in consumer (Airbnb, Pinterest), productivity (YC startup Muddy/Sail), and enterprise (Watershed). keywords: product engineer, full-stack engineer, frontend engineer, design engineer, ux engineer, ux prototyper, creative technologist ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Watershed Jan 2024 – Present climate tech startup backed by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. I build end-to-end product features to help companies decarbonize, including the footprint creation flow, large-scale data analysis tools, virtualized tables, and data lineage node graph visualizations over very large datasets. I helped start "Watershed Labs", the company’s experimental product group, where I prototype AI-first copilot products, including AI-native dashboard and report builders, spreadsheet-like data exploration, and AI-powered data lineage analyst workflows. – I champion design system and frontend infrastructure/testing improvements, and mentor teammates on frontend engineering best practices. – Top Cursor user at the company, ranked as a top 0.01 percent Cursor user in San Francisco, and voted “most AI-pilled” person at the company. Stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Temporal, PostgreSQL, DuckDB. ### Founding Software Engineer @ Muddy (formerly Sail) Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 yc-backed (5.5M seed) multiplayer web browser for teams based on chromium. prototyping and building novel browser UIs on top of chromium. Collaboration features included, messaging/chat, multiplayer infinite canvas, notifications, audio calls, collaborative text editor (tiptap/prosemirror), and more. Technologies: chromium fork with JS/C++ bridge exposing browser functionality (blink rendering, tabs, history, extensions etc.), React, Node.js, Redis Pub/Sub, GraphQL Subscriptions, MongoDB. Company set out to change how we use computers with each together and mark a dent in productivity software. Although Muddy got some early traction, the company eventually winded down after struggling to find product-market fit, I learned a ton along the way—about building products 0 to 1, pushing browser technology, crafting complex frontends, prototyping and talking to users, dealing with pivots, and where software might go :) more about what was built here: https://portfolio.alejandro.pe/muddy https://portfolio.alejandro.pe/sail https://feelmuddy.com/ previously https://sail.online/ ### Senior Software Engineer @ Airbnb Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Search Team - Responsible for search input (autosuggest and autocomplete), filters (dates, guests, price, amenities etc.) and search API (Typescript, React, CSS-in-JS, Java Microservices). Part of on-call rotation for Airbnb's main web app (node.js, kubernetes etc.) 2022 built new search input experience for I'm flexible 2.0 press: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/11/airbnb-categories-split-stays-aircover/ https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/11/23066798/airbnb-lovefrom-jony-ive-redesign-categories-split-stays 2021 built new categories filters for "I'm flexible" and Tech Lead for flexible dates search feature gave external talk on how Airbnb is building "flexibility into search" https://reengineeringtravel.splashthat.com/ press: https://www.engadget.com/airbnb-flexible-search-140306311.html https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/366013 https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/airbnb-plans-for-a-new-kind-of-travel-post-covid-with-flexible-search/ https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Travel/airbnb-launches-flexible-search-feature-travelers-options/story?id=76205967 2019-2020 Built new search bar, multi-step mobile search input flow, and filters (guests, dates, price, amenities, property type etc.) as part of Airbnb's 2020 re-design. Multiple projects on filters architecture foundation, refactoring and rewrite on typescript. Help build new filters for online experiences and UI for nearby destination search as part of COVID-19 response. Prototyping on the future of Airbnb's search experience with a focus on flexibility. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Airbnb Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Design Language System (DLS) Team – Worked on React reusable UI components (design system) and tooling for faster/better UI and JavaScript development. Learned a lot about web infrastructure. Technologies: JavaScript, React, Webpack, Babel (transpiling, codemods, AST parsing etc.), ESLint, Storybook, Happo (visual diffing). ### Accel Scholar @ Accel Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area selected by venture capital firm Accel and UC Berkeley’s EECS department for personalized mentorship, networking, and industry-relevant curriculum. Accel investments include Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, Spotify etc. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/01/accel-launches-uc-berkeley-mentorship-program/ https://eecs.berkeley.edu/resources/undergrads/accel ### Undergraduate Research Assistant @ University of California, Berkeley Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Berkeley, CA As an undergrad I helped with research in the following labs: - Hybrid Ecologies Lab: Exploring Augmented Reality for hybrid making and fabrication. Microsoft Hololens (C#, Unity). - Algorithms for Computing and Education (BiD): Helped with the integration of learning program transformation by example algorithms to OK (https://okpy.org/), Berkeley's Automate Grading & Personalize Feedback App. Used Python and C#. - Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS): Developed Data Science Visualization using React.js and Bokeh (JS and Python). ### Software Engineering Pintern @ Pinterest Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, California Core Product Team – Worked on Pinterest’s React UI Library and ran multiple A/B test experiments for the 1st half of my internship. And for the 2nd half of my internship I worked on project "Duplo" helping rewrite Pinterest as a progressive web app/mobile web app. I got to see how much Pinterest grew in a year, I learned a lot about platform teams how they help scale organizations, and how engineers can rally teams around ambitious projects. Technologies: JavaScript, React, Redux, Python (API/backend). Pinterest's React UI library: https://github.com/pinterest/gestalt Pinterest's new Mobile Web: https://medium.com/dev-channel/a-pinterest-progressive-web-app-performance-case-study-3bd6ed2e6154 ### KPCB Engineering Fellow @ Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Mentorship program by KPCB VC firm. 57 Engineering Fellows out of ~2500 applicants. http://kpcbfellows.com/ KPCB investments include Google, Amazon, Figma, Snapchat, etc. ### Software Enginnering Pintern @ Pinterest Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, California First "job in Sillicon Valley" after freshman year. Learned a lot about big tech companies and what it takes to scale them. I worked on the Observability Infrastructure team – Wrote jobs for Pinterest’s internal analytics dashboard (Python) and wrote realtime ingestion pipeline for “Pintrace” distributed tracer (Spark, Kafka, Thrift, Zipkin). Pintrace got open sourced! you can read more about it here: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/distributed-tracing-at-pinterest-with-new-open-source-tools-a4f8a5562f6b ### Instructor & Web Developer @ Laboratoria Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Lima, Peru In my 6 months after graduating high school from Peru and before starting college in the U.S. I worked at Laboratoria, a 6-month bootcamp that empowers people from low-income backgrounds by giving them access to education and work in the digital sector. I simultaneously worked at "Ayu" a small web dev agency owned by the founders of Laboratoria. At Laboratoria I learned a lot about scaling a startup, web development, education and social impact organizations. I was an early employee in Peru (less than 5 employees), today Laboratoria has multiple offices across Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Colombia). I was a web development instructor in Laboratoria's Bootcamp. As part of my work, I developed coursework, lesson plans, and internal tools for teaching. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-05/learning-to-code-empowers-women-in-latin-america https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/dec/01/cracking-code-tech-women-latin-america- https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/03/peru-code-breaking-women-150308070034951.html https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/bootcamps-raising-expectations-girls-math-science-and-technology ### Web Developer @ Ayu Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Lima, Peru In my 6 months after graduating high school from Peru, In addition to working at Laboratoria I worked at Ayu, a small web dev agency, owned by the founders of Laboratoria. I learned a lot about web development and how agencies work and what it's like building projects for a customer. I worked with HTML, CSS, JS, PHP/MySQL, Codeigniter and the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node.js) I also dabbled a bit on UI/UX research and learned about "Design Thinking". ### Independent iOS Game Developer @ Self-employed Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 naively got into programming by making iPhone games in high school using objective-c and the cocos2d library. I owned the entire process: game design, graphic design, level design and programming. After pouring many hours working after school and 2 summers I published 3 games for sale on the apple appstore to play on my ipod touch 4. The games were fun enough to play but most importantly they were a lot of fun to make. I programmed, made art, and designed the games myself. The experience gave me a lot of respect for game developers and taught me a lot about picking up new skills and the craftsmanship, joy, and challenge that goes into making something end to end and got me into the career path I am in today. Developer Profile: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/algarcia/id507322805?l=en ## Education ### Computer Science in Cognitive Science, Human-centered-design University of California, Berkeley Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alejandrogarciasalas - Website: http://alejandro.pe - Website: http://alejandro.pe - GitHub: http://github.com/alejandrogarciasalas --- Source: https://flows.cv/alejandrogarcasalas JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alejandrogarcasalas/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22