I build businesses on products customers love — and I try to define the category before anyone else does.
I own the full stack: technical architecture, product direction, and the organization that executes it. I do my best work in lean, fast-moving environments where the goal is to be first to market. Optimizing what already exists is someone else’s job.
I’ve personally written production code, architected platforms, and built products from scratch with 5-person teams that grew to $30M in revenue. When I say “show me the code,” I mean it.
I grew up in two places: Chicago’s South Side and rural Central Florida near the Bible Belt.
Both working class, both far from what’s considered typical in white-collar tech. I’m the first high school graduate in my family on either side. My roots are tied to Chicago’s Mexican working-class community — we’ve been in the same neighborhood for over a century. I’ve been self-supporting since I was 17.
My academic path wasn’t a straight line: Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Latin American Studies at UIC, Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, Computer Science at DePaul — all while working full time.
The throughline is systems thinking. I see organizations, products, and teams as complex systems. I look for outlier perspectives and challenge default assumptions.
Doubled engineering headcount without a recruiter. Stood up modern DevOps practices in my first week. Reset QA in two months. Grew a team from 1 to 9 in one quarter. Speed isn’t recklessness — it’s respect for time.
I help teams connect their work to customers, stay focused on outcomes, and ship value every day.
AI agents in infrastructure, AI-assisted management workflows, AI-native IaC. The teams I build use AI to move faster — not as a buzzword.
Values
Ship on time, drama-free. When we miss, we get back up.
See a need, fill a need — regardless of job description.
We iterate on process the same way we iterate on code.
Not a perk. A prerequisite.
Beyond outcomes — this is about justice and equity.
What I Measure
Are customers getting measurably more value this quarter than last?
Did we ship what we said we’d ship, when we said we’d ship it?
Availability, latency, error rates — the basics that earn trust.
Bugs that reach customers tell you where the process broke.
Not story points — throughput trends that reveal systemic friction.
How I Communicate
I get to clarity fast. It’s a form of respect.
I have a lot of ideas and I like to talk them through. The best ideas come from teams, not individuals.
If I need something by a specific date or time, I’ll say so. No guesswork.
On Systems
Extensible, modular, polymorphic, instrumented. These keep systems resilient and ready for change.
Of the eight fallacies of distributed computing, the most dangerous is assuming the network is reliable. It isn’t. Design like failure is inevitable — because it is.
Teams that build, run, and support their own systems in production move faster and break less. Ownership is the ultimate feedback loop.