Matias Navarro-Carter

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

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

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

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