Career Summary

A self-taught, hands-on Software Engineer with 8+ years of experience in Web Development. Competent across all layers of the stack, I mostly excel in backend technologies, CI/CD, cloud and containarization. I'm a PHP Jedi Master, but I can also write Golang, Typescript and a bit of Rust. I work at my best in places where I can have autonomy, with exciting products and varied interesting technical challenges, where there is little red tape and process overload. I'm passionate about code quality, software architecture, testing, mentoring and Open Source software.

Work Experience

Senior Engineer

DeskPRO - London, UK
Apr 2023 - Dec 2023

I joined DeskPRO as one of the few Senior Engineers on a small team of both full time employers and contractors. I was able to hit the ground running and start shipping a delivering features.

I worked on the Help Desk AI Features for Agents, integrating OpenAI with our product and making it do really cool things. I was able to learn a lot about LLMs, In-Context learning (Prompt engineering), and Vector Databases. I also built a small proxy in Go for our cloud customers using OpenAI.

Technologies used:

  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • React
  • Go
  • MySQL
  • OpenAI
  • GraphQL
  • Vector Databases

Senior Software Engineer

Engineered - Belfast, UK
Nov 2022 - Apr 2023

Engineered was a venture from The Customer Bureau, to provide engineering consulting services to their existing clients. I joined with the prospect of being able to shape the engineering culture and processes of a company that was starting, and to come back to the days when I had the chance to work on different domains and technologies for big clients. Unfortunately, due to commercial reasons the venture didn't succeed and not long after I joined I was forced to leave.

Nonetheless, the short time I spent there I was able to learn a bit more about e-commerce in PHP by means of using Spryker, mentor other engineers, and get involved in areas like product development and service design. I also developed some soft skills on market research and sales. I also learned a good deal about AWS and even built some tools to solve a particular problem we were having with deployment.

Technologies used:

  • PHP
  • AWS
  • AI
  • Docker
  • Spryker
  • MySQL
  • GitHub Actions

Senior Software Engineer

Divido - London, UK
Aug 2022 - Nov 2023

The COVID period, awful as it was, opened the possibility for someone living in rural Northern Ireland to work pretty much anywhere on the world. And when Divido, an exciting London Fintech approached me to be a Senior Engineer there, it was really hard to say no.

At my tenure in Divido I had to jump straight into some fires, trying to push forward the development and release of our various lender integrations that had been stuck for different commercial and/or technical reasons. I worked closely with POs and PMs to ensure understanding of the technical requirements and implement them correctly. It was a role with a lot of emphasis on 3rd party API integrations, and I had the chance to work with many different protocols (REST, mTLS, gRPC), standards (OAuth, JOSE, SAML) and providers (Royal Mail, HSBC, M&S). On a regular day I was jumping into different codebases, on different languages (mostly Go and PHP) fixing things, adding tests and implementing features.

Other duties involved interviewing other candidates, onboarding new joiners to the Divido platform, writing documentation and the mentoring, code reviewing and unblocking of more junior members of the team. I also led the initiative of Tech Talk Fridays, where we gather to watch a tech talk at the end of or working day while enjoying a pint and a pizza.

Technologies used:

  • Golang
  • PHP
  • AWS
  • Symfony
  • React
  • Kubernetes
  • HELM
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD
  • Datadog
  • Jira/Confluence

PHP Developer

Spatialest - Coleraine, UK
Mar 2020 - Aug 2021

My wife and I decided to move to the UK to be closer to her family, and this was possible thanks to Spatialest, a small but vibrant company in Coleraine, Northern Ireland.

I lead a small team that had the mission to rebuild Appeals: a software used by many counties in the US to manage property Appeals from their taxpayers. It was a case-management kind of software. It solved many issues with the first iteration of the product, which was excessive flexibility that lead to poor implementation times and convoluted logic. In my time there we managed to create an excellent product that we were able to sell easily and deploy fast, and that is still being sold and used.

While developing Appeals, I also introduced and tried to champion more modern Software Development processes, like automated code integration (using GitHub Actions), code reviews and automated deployment to different environments, as well as containerization.

Technologies used:

  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • Doctrine
  • React
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD

Senior Developer

Option - Santiago, CL
Sep 2017 - Feb 2020

My career took off when I accepted an offer to join Option, one of the most prestigious Software Agencies in the heart of Santiago, Chile. In my tenure there, I worked alongside some of the most talented engineers in the capital, from whom I learned a lot.

Joining as a regular Engineer, I was able to quickly grow into a Senior position and become a key engineer, taking on big projects and mentoring other members of the company. My role was backend-focused, building REST APIs in PHP+Symfony and, towards the end of my tenure, in NodeJS + Express. I maintained the company's extensive suite of Symfony Bundles, which I expanded creating many of my own.

My favourite project was the building of a patient dashboard for a prestigious sports clinic in Chile, building integrations with many REST and SOAP services. One of the biggest and hardest projects I was a part of was the revamping of the whole omnichannel sales experience of one of the biggest airlines in Chile, where I was doing a bit of frontend and also developing an API for integrating and abstracting different payment gateways.

Technologies used:

  • PHP
  • Symfony
  • Docker
  • Google Cloud
  • NodeJS
  • Express
  • RabbitMQ
  • MySQL
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • Gitlab CI/CD

Freelance Web Developer

Ncai - Santiago, CL
Nov 2015 - Sept 2017

I started my career in Web Development by setting up a small company with my brother, who had more experience than me in the field and whom I learnt a lot from in these years. We were fairly successful in building different backoffice panels for map data visualization for different organizations, pulling data from different data-stores and APIS, and using leaflet JS on top of Codeigniter and Laravel. Among our clients were the Chilean Police Force, the Chilean Military and the Chilean National Mining Service. These varied projects allowed me to put in practice what I knew already and also learning a lot more, preparing me for the next step.

Technologies used:

  • PHP
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • Codeigniter
  • jQuery
  • Giscloud
  • Leaflet JS
  • Laravel
  • Vuejs

Skills & Tools

Backend

  • PHP
  • Symfony
  • Laravel
  • Docker
  • Go
  • Node JS
  • Rust

Frontend

  • React
  • Javascript / Typescript
  • Svelte
  • HTML/CSS/SASS/LESS

Others

  • DevOps
  • AWS
  • Github Actions
  • Code Review
  • Git
  • Unit Testing
  • REST
  • Graph QL

Education

  • BA in History
    Andres Bello University, Chile
    2006 - 2011
  • BA Bible and Theology
    Colegio Biblico, Eagle Pass, TX, USA.
    2012 - 2014

Talks & Workshops

Languages

  • Spanish (Native)
  • English (Professional)

Interests

  • History & Philosophy
  • Football
  • DYIng
  • Sustainability
  • Home Automation
  • Open Source