My Story

The path that got me here

Three acts, in order. The first two explain where the communication and resilience came from; the third is where they met the tools.

Act 1

Before the terminal

Years of hospitality, teaching, and travel — the foundation, not the prelude.

  1. Competitive Swimmer

    2004 — 2013Santiago, Chile

    Competitive Swimmer

    Santiago, Chile

    Nine years of 4 a.m. training didn't just build discipline — it installed a default setting: organized, proactive, someone who finishes what they start. That operating system never left.

    DisciplineWork EthicSelf-MotivationReliabilityAdaptability
  2. Computer Science Engineering

    Mar 2016 — Jan 2021Degree

    Computer Science Engineering

    Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI)

    UAI's professional-formation pillar — leadership, written and oral expression, critical thinking — turned out to matter more than the engineering curriculum itself. Communication without empathy is just noise; that idea quietly underpinned everything that came after.

    LeadershipCommunicationPublic SpeakingCritical ThinkingTechnical WritingEmpathy
  3. Event Staff & Waiter

    Aug 2016 — Jun 2019Santiago, Chile · Part-Time

    Event Staff & Waiter

    Amelia Izquierdo

    Years of invisible, one-shot event work left me with a quiet, unpretentious respect for people: no one is only what they appear to be, and everyone deserves the chance to prove it.

    TeamworkCommunicationAdaptabilityWork EthicEmpathyClient-Facing
  4. Instructor

    Jan 2017 — Feb 2021Santiago, Chile · Part-Time

    Instructor

    School of Tech

    Four years of explaining the same ideas to ten-year-olds, veteran teachers, and corporate adults taught me that communication is reading the room and adapting, not just speaking clearly. It also gave me my first taste of analytical, business-shaped work — and confirmed where I actually wanted to go.

    TeachingMentorshipCommunicationPublic SpeakingLeadershipEntrepreneurshipAdaptabilityCross-Cultural
  5. Mentor

    Mar 2018 — Nov 2019Santiago, Chile · Freelance

    Mentor

    Silabuz

    A short, focused chapter that reinforced one thing: teaching people how to think is worth more than teaching them what to know.

    TeachingMentorshipCommunicationEntrepreneurshipCritical Thinking

Act 2

The pivot

At some point the question stopped being 'what's next' and started being 'what do I want to build for the next decade'.

The answer was systems. Not because I loved code in the abstract — because I'd spent years explaining complex things to people who didn't have time to care, and software was the most leveraged version of that work I could find.

Act 3

Building systems

Professional engineering work — data infrastructure, internal tools, and the products around them.

  1. Product Owner

    Dec 2020 — Feb 2022Chile (Remote) · Full-Time

    Product Owner

    AidProf

    AidProf compressed years of growth into fourteen months by forcing complete ownership with no safety net. It left me an engineer who thinks in whole systems and products, not just the piece in front of me.

    OCRComputer VisionNLPMachine LearningLinear RegressionCosine SimilarityBag-of-WordsETLData PipelinesCI/CDREST APIsAPI IntegrationCloud InfrastructureRelational Databases
  2. Data Engineer

    Jul 2021 — Oct 2024Chile (Remote) · Full-Time

    Data Engineer

    uPlanner

    uPlanner turned a capable builder into a well-rounded data engineer — owning integrations end to end, navigating client relationships, and fixing systemic inefficiencies before anyone asked. By the end I was working well past my title, which is the most honest measure of the growth the role produced.

    ETLELTData PipelinesData ModelingLegacy MigrationModernizationInternal ToolingDeveloper ExperienceREST APIsAPI IntegrationPaginationAsync ProcessingCloud InfrastructureRelational DatabasesNoSQLData ValidationObservabilityError LoggingCI/CDVersion Control
  3. Software Project Lead

    Nov 2024 — PresentAustin, Texas · Contract

    Software Project Lead

    Apple

    Apple is where I became an architect rather than just an implementer — holding a five-system platform in my head at once and reasoning about scale, resilience, and trade-offs from every angle: data, backend, infra, frontend, and security. It taught me the senior role is as much about mentoring, pushing back on the easy-but-wrong answer, and owning outcomes end-to-end as it is about writing the code.

    Distributed SystemsDistributed LockingCachingConnection PoolingDatabase PartitioningDatabase MigrationsZero-Downtime DeploymentAutoscalingGitOpsMicroservicesData WarehousingChange Data Capture (CDC)Workflow OrchestrationState MachinesETLELTData PipelinesData ModelingRelational DatabasesNoSQLREST APIsAPI IntegrationAsync ProcessingCloud InfrastructureObservabilityError LoggingIncident ResponseRoot-Cause AnalysisPerformance OptimizationSecurity HardeningAuthenticationRBACOIDCJWTSecrets ManagementRate LimitingAutomated TestingType SafetyCI/CDVersion ControlData ValidationMachine LearningDeep LearningAnomaly DetectionNLPLLMsRAGKnowledge GraphsAI AgentsEmbeddingsExplainable AIMLOpsTime-Series AnalysisStatistical AnalysisInternal ToolingDeveloper Experience

Now

What's next

I'm looking for the next role where I can keep doing this — building data and backend systems that hold up, and translating between the people who build them and the people who depend on them. If that matches what you're hiring for, the contact page has the fastest route in.

Get in touch