About

I make the web faster, more accessible, and more consistent.

I’m Elara Voss, a senior frontend engineer and design systems architect based in Amsterdam. Over the past 8 years I’ve worked across agencies, startups, and scale-ups — building everything from marketing sites to real-time trading dashboards. My work sits at the intersection of engineering rigour and design sensibility.

I specialise in Astro, React, and TypeScript, with a particular focus on performance engineering and design system architecture. I care deeply about Core Web Vitals, web accessibility, and the craft of writing component APIs that other engineers actually enjoy using.

Before joining Forma Labs as a senior engineer in 2022, I spent three years at Bloom Digital helping transform a jQuery monolith into a modern React application, and a year before that building agency sites at Pixel & Co, where I first learned to obsess over load times.

I graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from TU Delft in 2018. Outside of work, I’m a regular speaker at Amsterdam.js, an occasional open source contributor, and a very amateur cyclist.

Skills & Technologies

Astro React TypeScript CSS / Tailwind Design Systems Figma Node.js Performance Auditing Web Accessibility Test-Driven Development Storybook WebSockets

Experience

  1. Senior Frontend Engineer

    at Forma Labs

    Leading frontend architecture across three product squads. Built the Meridian design system, established performance budgets, and reduced time-to-interactive by 60% across core user flows.

  2. Frontend Engineer

    at Bloom Digital

    Rebuilt the company's flagship SaaS product from a jQuery monolith to a React application. Introduced TypeScript, component testing with Vitest, and automated accessibility auditing.

  3. Junior Developer

    at Pixel & Co

    Built marketing sites and interactive landing pages for agency clients. First exposure to performance budgets and Core Web Vitals before they were a formal Google metric.

Engineering Philosophy

Performance is the feature

Speed is not a nice-to-have. A 1-second delay in page response causes a 7% reduction in conversions. I treat performance budgets as first-class product requirements, not afterthoughts.

Accessibility is not optional

WCAG compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. I build for keyboard navigation, screen readers, reduced motion, and high contrast from day one — because retrofitting accessibility is ten times harder than building it in.

Design and engineering must speak the same language

The gap between Figma and production is where quality dies. Design tokens, shared vocabulary, and tight designer-engineer collaboration are what close that gap. Design systems are the infrastructure for that conversation.

Education

TU

BSc Computer Science

TU Delft — Delft, Netherlands