Bogotá, Colombia · GMT-5 · Remote
Senior Full Stack Engineer & Tech Lead
I built a real-time voice translator because my English kept slowing me down in interviews.
Nine years writing software, seven of them at the same company. When the platform started buckling under load, I rewrote its slowest modules and their queries. I train capoeira three times a week and I teach it. And when I want to learn a new language, I build something with it.
~10s → <2s
Response time after I rewrote the slowest modules and their queries. Solo, in under two months.
1.2M
Active users on the client the platform could finally take on once it stopped falling over.
10
Developers working from the code style guide I wrote.
~8 / week
Pull requests I review. I am one of two people allowed to deploy to production.
All of it from my current role at Zalvadora.
I am a full stack engineer and tech lead in Bogotá. I started in April 2017 and I am self-taught: secondary school, two years on Platzi, and everything after that learned by building things and breaking them.
I am still learning every day and I still get things wrong. What I do not do is hide it: when something breaks I take it on and come back with a solution rather than an explanation.
What I actually enjoy is the unglamorous part: figuring out why a query takes ten seconds, and then making it take one. I also like talking to clients, which is apparently rare among developers, and it is how I ended up leading a team rather than just being on one.
Right now I lead two developers, own our AWS infrastructure, and work on the AI lab the company started a few months ago. Before all of that I spent three and a half years as a full stack developer on that same platform.
01
Three projects that are mine, with the parts that did not work left in — they are usually the part worth telling.
Bilateral real-time voice translation for Meet, Zoom and Teams.
Two audio channels running in parallel: what the other person says arrives translated in my headphones, and my voice goes out translated into the call. Python, on a Deepgram → Groq → Cartesia pipeline.
Daily expense tracking, built because nothing else fit how I actually spend.
A system for managing day-to-day expenses, written in JavaScript. I am currently rewriting it in Swift and SwiftUI, partly because I wanted it native on my phone and partly because rewriting something you already understand is the fastest way to learn a language.
A clock that knows what is on your calendar and how long each task took.
Shows your calendar events and tracks the time you spend per task, in one place. Written in JavaScript.
Transcription when a call ends, audio control, camera handling, alerts for links dropped in the chat. I built these together with a colleague and they live in his GitHub account, so there is no link here — you would not find me in the commits.
Rewriting Cuentas in Swift/SwiftUI, and adapting career-ops — an open-source job search tool built by someone else, not by me — to automate my own search with Claude.
02
Nine years and two companies.
January 2023 – present
Bogotá, Colombia · Remote
I own architecture decisions, the AWS infrastructure, and production deploy approval. I have led teams of up to five developers; right now it is two.
June 2019 – January 2023
Bogotá, Colombia
Three and a half years on the platform I would later lead.
April 2017 – April 2019
Bogotá, Colombia
Where I started, and where I learned that infrastructure is not somebody else's problem.
03
Query optimisation is the part of this job I enjoy most.
Four servers in production, autoscaling to ten.
What we are building in the AI lab.
04
What I do once the laptop is closed.
I train on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, and I teach classes too. It is a game, a fight, music and a conversation all at once, and I have been at it for many years.
About four years of playing now. I started from nothing and I am still working through new pieces — it is how I switch off.
I train kickboxing as well. I like sport that demands your full attention: the moment you drift, you notice.
I travel every chance I get. New places, food I cannot pronounce, and coming home with stories — that is the part I enjoy most.
05
Write to me wherever suits you best.
Download my CV (PDF) One page, English.