Erik Grijzen
Principal Software Engineer at New Relic
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan chats with Erik Grijzen — Principal Software Engineer at New Relic — about building one of the first large-scale micro-frontend architectures, the rise of observability, and what technical leadership looks like across dozens of teams.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Erik:
🏗 Building micro-frontends before they had a name.
When New Relic unified over twenty SPAs into a single extensible platform, Erik led the architectural effort that enabled every team to deploy independently while maintaining shared consistency and performance.
⚙️ Runtime composition at scale.
From CLI tooling to runtime loading from CDNs, Erik explains how teams can push a micro-frontend to production within a day — and why polyrepo setups made extensibility possible.
🔍 Observability as a business layer.
Observability isn’t just about logs and metrics anymore. Erik describes how New Relic connects system telemetry with user behavior and business impact, making reliability a shared company goal, not just a developer metric.
🧠 Influence over authority.
As a principal engineer, Erik doesn’t manage people directly — he leads by influence. He shares how to align dozens of teams through shared vision, mentorship, and documented decision-making.
🧩 RFCs and decision docs make teams better.
Writing change documents improves ideas before they’re even reviewed. Erik shares how structured writing and technical documentation shape better solutions and build clarity across distributed teams.
🧰 POCs before roadmaps.
Instead of planning large initiatives upfront, Erik recommends writing documentation or running proof-of-concepts first — “If it’s hard to explain, it’s probably not right.”
💬 Observability for micro-frontends.
Since no tools existed when they began, New Relic built an internal SDK to give each micro-frontend its own scoped telemetry and error context — something now becoming an industry need.
🌿 Balancing scale and life.
Erik shares practical ways to manage stress: sports, routines, and structured shutdown rituals that separate deep work from personal time.
📚 Recommended Reads:
- A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
- 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
🎬 Also in this episode:
- How a trillion requests per minute backend powers New Relic’s frontend architecture
- The hidden trade-offs of iframes and module federation
- Why teams organized by domain scale better than feature-based ones
- How incident rollbacks and version pinning simplify on-call
- The mindset shift from shipping code to shaping culture
Episode Length: 1 hour of deep technical insights and leadership lessons for anyone scaling frontend platforms or engineering teams.
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