Curriculum Vitæ

Contact

Email: | Location: Martinique | Timezone: GMT-4.

Links: Linkedin | Github

Summary

I’m a Software Engineer with over 20 years of experience. I enjoy building and understanding systems across the whole stack, from a polished UX to scalable backend and infrastructure. I’m the person who stays calm when everything is on fire and digs until he finds the root cause. I’ve successfully led teams and managed people, yet I’m at my best building products and solving hard problems.

Experience

Freshcognate – Software Engineer, Contract (Oct 2025 – Present, Remote, US-based company, HQ in Boston, MA)

Educational Technology & Learning Experience Design

Building AI-powered tools for educational research, focused on tutoring quality assessment and privacy-preserving data processing. Owning the full product lifecycle from translating loose requirements into polished user experiences to implementation and delivery.

Key Achievements

  • Developed an AI-based annotation tool for the National Tutoring Observatory, enabling researchers to analyze one-on-one tutoring transcripts at scale using LLMs. The tool transforms raw tutoring data into structured insights by identifying instructional techniques such as praise and probing questions. Built with TypeScript, React Router, Tailwind CSS, and LiteLLM.
  • Co-authored a research paper on utility-preserving de-identification (“Utility-Preserving De-Identification for Math Tutoring: Investigating Numeric Ambiguity in the MathEd-PII Benchmark Dataset”, arXiv 2602.16571), addressing the challenge of removing PII from educational datasets while preserving mathematical content for AI training.
  • Developing a PII de-identification library combining LLMs (via LiteLLM) with NLP models (Presidio) and deterministic methods, featuring context-aware redaction strategies including realistic “hidden in plain sight” replacements that preserve text readability. Built with Python.

Intellum – Director of Systems Engineering (Jun 2023 – Mar 2025, Remote, US-based company, HQ in Atlanta, GA)

Enterprise Learning & EdTech

As a Director, I broadened my scope of impact to lead cross-team and company-wide technical initiatives, while remaining deeply involved in architecture, system design, and hands-on implementation.

Key Achievements

  • Built a cross-cloud disaster recovery platform, automating backups and restores across AWS and GCP. Reduced MTTR from 24h to 8h (67% improvement), meeting a 24h SLA and strengthening business continuity for millions of monthly learners.
  • Redesigned the application’s asset proxy, replacing Apache2 + mod_perl with Nginx + Lua. Enabled multi-region integration across applications, modernized request authentication with AWS SigV4 and strong cryptography, eliminated an unmaintainable legacy component, and improved request performance by up to 20%.
  • Built proofs-of-concept for IAM improvements in AWS and GCP, then drove adoption across engineering teams. Defined IAM roles and service accounts, replaced long-term credentials, and integrated AWS Identity Center, improving security posture and reducing operational risk.
  • Drove adoption of continuous deployment, increasing release frequency from weekly to multiple daily deployments, and implemented a company-wide release notes system for cross-department visibility, maintaining 99.95% SLA uptime.

Intellum – Systems Engineering Manager (Feb 2021 – Jul 2023, Remote, US-based company, HQ in Atlanta, GA)

I was tasked with growing and restructuring a single-person operation to a full team, hiring and onboarding engineers, all while remaining hands-on with platform design, tooling, and day-to-day operations, spending up to 50% of my time doing individual contributor work.

Key Achievements

  • Developed and maintained a CLI used daily by 40+ engineers, automating secure server access with short-lived keys, pre-built log queries, and environment management across clusters. Reduced onboarding time and operational friction significantly.
  • Optimized AWS costs by 20%, generating $100K+ annual savings through reservation automation, audits, and service deprecations.
  • Developed internal Rails tooling for DNS management, SSL automation, and provider integrations, improving security and streamlining communication between departments and clients, reducing back-and-forth with Support teams.
  • Hired and structured the team, including Systems Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and SREs. Designed interview processes and technical tests to ensure high-quality hires and accelerate onboarding.

Intellum – Senior Systems Engineer (Dec 2018 – Mar 2021)

Hired to stabilize and scale a fragile infrastructure as the company grew. Designed and built an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to deploy Ruby on Rails and Node.js applications, introducing infrastructure-as-code, automation, and CI/CD practices. Delivered a robust, scalable platform capable of handling major spikes in traffic, laying the foundation for modern DevOps operations.

Key Achievements

  • Designed and implemented a robust automation framework covering all infrastructure needs, IaC, package management, CI, and deployments, using Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Jenkins, Spinnaker, and Nexus to enable reproducible, maintainable, and scalable operations.
  • Implemented Infrastructure-as-Code for 90% of existing infrastructure and all new systems, managing 100+ custom Terraform modules. Automated server provisioning with 30+ custom Ansible roles, reducing manual intervention and simplifying operations.
  • Developed a self-service deployment platform, reducing deploy time from a full morning once per week to less than one hour several times per week, while ensuring 99.95% uptime with no SLA penalties.
  • Scaled infrastructure from <20 to 550+ servers, maintaining stability and performance under rapid growth and high traffic.
  • Engineered infrastructure for high-profile live events and conferences, scaling hundreds of servers and massive databases to handle thousands of concurrent users. Each event required extensive capacity planning, load testing, and real-time monitoring to keep the platform stable under peak stress.

Schibsted Media Group – Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Jul 2015 – Dec 2018, Barcelona, Spain)

I built developer-focused infrastructure solutions, improving automation, security, and scalability at the platform level. My work spanned managed databases, CI/CD, and security automation.

Key Achievements

  • Developed self-service database management tools for 30+ Cassandra, Kafka, and Zookeeper clusters across 100+ servers, primarily in Python with some Go, reducing manual work by 70% and ensuring platform availability.
  • Developed key components of a self-service VPN platform used by 1,000+ engineers, building backend APIs (Python) and frontend (Ember.js), and supporting services in Go, deployed via fully automated CI/CD pipelines, achieving 99.9% SLO availability and reducing operational overhead.
  • Initiated a template repository for infrastructure projects, standardizing tooling and automation, later expanded collaboratively by other teams to simplify project setup.

XING – Senior Software Engineer & DevOps (May 2011 – Jul 2015, Barcelona, Spain)

I worked across Rails backend and frontend development and DevOps, supporting developer productivity, infrastructure automation, and CI/CD.

Key Achievements

  • Led a team of 10 engineers in the development of XING’s Talent Manager, a tool that enabled a new Recruitment B2B business line, launched at Zukunft Personal, Germany’s largest HR fair, built with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript (Backbone & Marionette.js).
  • Built backend APIs and services using Ruby on Rails, to integrate with the event platform of a newly acquired company, improving workflow efficiency and enabling new business functionality.
  • Maintained development environments for 250+ engineers, automating provisioning and infrastructure with VMware, Chef, and Docker, reducing setup time and enabling smoother engineering workflows.
  • Scaled and optimized Ruby on Rails applications for performance and high availability.

Earlier Roles

  • Freelance / Various Clients (Oct 2011 – May 2017, Remote, Barcelona, Spain) – Developed full-stack Rails applications, automated infrastructure, and optimized performance for startups. Key projects: UEFA Euro 2012 apps (ticket auction & support).
  • Just Landed (Jun 2009 – Jan 2011, Barcelona, Spain) – Full-stack Engineer, developing and optimizing high-traffic Ruby on Rails applications, improving performance, SEO, and scalability.
  • Various roles as Software Engineer (2005 – 2009, Caracas, Venezuela & Madrid, Spain) – Full-stack development and consulting. Details available upon request.

Technical Expertise

Software Development

Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Node.js

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, Route 53, EKS, SNS, Backup, Systems Manager, Cost Explorer), GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, IAM, GKE, PubSub, BigQuery, Billing & Cost Management), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Nginx, Linux

AI & NLP

LLMs, LiteLLM, Presidio, NLP, Prompt Engineering

Databases

PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB

CI/CD & Automation

Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, Git, Deployment Automation, DevOps

System Optimization & Security

Performance tuning, monitoring & observability, cost optimization, IAM & access management, network security hardening, high-availability architectures, disaster recovery, business continuity

Education

Universidad Simón Bolívar – Computer Engineering (2000 – 2005, Caracas, Venezuela)

Languages

  • English – Native/Bilingual
  • Spanish - Native/Bilingual
  • French – Fluent
  • Portuguese – Fluent
  • German - Basic