Universitat Jaume I

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Technical University of Munich

Google

Engineering Manager

Joined Schibsted as part of the technical leadership team, whose mission was to transform the group into a global tech company. During my tenure, I led two initiaves:

Marketplace components: Led and managed four teams in different locations, whose mission is to provide global services for the different sites owned by Schibsted in different markets.  Defined, together with Product and UX, what a global service is, starting with the strategy behind the effort.  Set up guidelines for technology, collaboration and stakeholder alignment. Defined expectations across companies and teams. Several services were launched in different markets (15+), reaching over 30M monthly active users. 

Engineering Productivity: Schibsted is reorganizing in order to become a global company, rather than a group of very autonomous companies.  Complexity, both in system interoperability and human collaboration, is increasing exponentially.  Engineering Productivity mission is to help the company scale by introducing basic building blocks of technology, processes and tooling so that teams across companies are able to deliver at speed. I built the team from scratch, from a set of new hires and internal identified talent. The effort initial focus is automation both in tooling and testing.

Schibsted Media Group

Director Of Engineering

I took over during the difficult time of retention programs vesting, which implied quite a lot of attrition.  Set up a no-jerk tolerance culture.  As the business started to pivot from social network to Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), which introduced a new set of technology challenges, drove the team towards sucess:  moving from a scalability centric culture (35K reqs/sec) to a transaction based one.  Used a tech stack change to drive the transformation:  frontend still in PHP/HipHop, while backend telco microservices in Java.  Ensured engineers were coached and trained in the new tooling, brought up new talent complementing skills. Worked together with VP of Product and the rest of the CEO leadership team to define company strategy and vision.

Tuenti

While still leading the games team, took responsibility over the testing framework, tools and release management teams.  Merged all of them into a new DevOps function, whose mission was to remove any blockers on the road slowing product delivery.  Pushed for global best practises around the company, improved development environment setup and CI stability.  Introduced automation around release processes that orchestrated source repositories (git/hg) operation handling, Jira, Jenkins in order to get to one-click releases.  Tuenti went from two releases a week to an uncertain number of them during the day, while decreasing manual testing to zero.  The same CD processes were established in mobile development, with their limitations around app store delivery taken into account.

Led and managed a team of software engineers in order to deliver a gaming platform in the social network for the game studios to integrate with.  The platform consisted of a set of Javascript and backend APIs enabling interoperability between the site and the games (user data, authentication, coin purchasing, highscore delivery).  Grew the team from 3 to 10 software engineers, established good software development practices (code reviews, automated testing, heavy monitoring and alarming), provided self-serve tooling for studios and reduced operational load to a bare minimum. Worked together with Product Manager and UX to define goals, roadmap and KPIs.  Collaborated with Business Development to establish relationships with studios and agree on technical contracts, APIs, SLAs.  Established a culture of continuous improvement.  Daily active users:  2 million.

Games & Transactions tech lead

Part of the initial tech team.  Main duty was backend website development in a J2EE/Spring environment.  Other duties ranged from system administration to coaching new hires.  Given the company was a startup, we just had lots of things to do, from assembling tables to racking servers in the datacenter. For the last two years, I had become the CTO’s right hand for solving technical problems.

11870.com

Software Engineer

Deployed and customized the Moodle virtual learning enviroment.  Built APIs on top of the course management layer in order to integrate Moodle with the university propietary academic management platform, so that a two way sync between both systems was possible.  Other tasks included network infrastructure operation and maintenance (SMTP, LDAP, DNS, XMPP server, etc.)

Luis Peralta