Professional (and academic) experience

(Last updated: May 28th 2025)

(I do have a LinkedIn profile if that’s more to your liking)

Undergraduate studies

I earned my bachelor’s degree from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where I studied from 2001 to 2006, graduating with a major in Computing Engineering (Ingeniería Informática). I chose my electives more out of curiosity than career awareness, so those included things like “Web technologies” (in a time where terms like “frontend development” did not exist and “Web services” usually meant working with SOAP and WSDL because REST was little more than a PhD thesis and JSON was in its infancy), as well as a course on Aritificial Intelligence, 20 years before the mid-2020s craze of large language models and generative AI.

First internship and full-time position

On the last year of my bachelors I started as an intern in Summa-Tec, a small consultancy firm in Lima, Perú; after graduation, I continued working there as a full-time software developer. My main responsibilities included coding for the various projects the company developed for its clients, which in all cases included Java, sometimes in the form of Web-based projects using the early versions of the Spring framework and other times using its GUI capabilities with Swing (which is not a thing anymore, I guess?). However, this being a small consultancy firm meant that I usually helped out with some other tasks, which included some occasional server maintenance and system administration tasks.

First corporate job

On September 2009, I decided to take the leap from the small consulting firm to a bigger, corporate position and accepted a role in Banco de Crédito BCP, one of the biggest banks in Perú. I started out as part of a team that basically did technical support to the Treasury and Exchange department, which for the most part meant working with Visual Basic and Microsoft products to maintain the apps developed inside the department and independently from the IT division of the company; later on I would join the IT division in an effort to formalize said applications, which translated to me doing the same tasks, but now adhering to the formal development process of the IT division. Can’t really say there was much in the way of working with new or innovative technologies, but the perks of a corporate job made up for it.

Back into a small, indie company and first leadership experience

Around 2 and a half years later, by the beginning of the 2nd quarter of 2012, I decided to trade the perks of the corporate job for a more exciting role at a small, indie company and joined DEVOS Inc, a company founded by a group of university classmates which, at the time, focused of developing with mobile technologies. I started there as leader of the development team and one of their first iOS developers (back when Objective-C was the only way to develop for iOS), but, again, this being a smaller company, I usually wore many hats, sharing the system administration and server maintenance tasks with one of the founders and being an active part of the development team.

I think it’s fair to say this was one of the most impactful experiences in my career, and not only because it lasted the longest. I learned a good set of new technologies, starting with mobile development in Android using Java and in iOS using first Objective-C and then Swift when it first came out, then expanding into modern Web development with front-end frameworks like React and back-end development using Python for some projects and Node.js for some others, alongside the patterns that were emerging at that time such as platform-as-a-service (we used Heroku for a long time) and cloud technologies (we also used Azure for a while as part of a program from Microsoft aimed at small companies). But also, this was my first experience leading a team: I joined the company not being sure that I was cut out for team leadership, and left competely convinced that I was fully capable of doing so, but also that it was not my cup of tea. And, last but not least, being close to the founding team and sharing part of the resposibility as a leader gave me some insights into all the effort necessary to keep a company running, even a small one, and gave me an appreciation for people that decide to go on the enterpreneurial path, even when I might not be inclined to do so.

Aside: Teaching experience

During my tenure at DEVOS Inc, I also tried my hand at teaching, first as a teaching assistant at my alma mater for a couple of semesters, and later as a part-time teacher at CIBERTEC, teaching courses centered around software development. It was an interesting experience, which allowed me to put my penchant for teaching to a more applied, formal setting; this allowed me to discover that my favorite part of teaching is the teaching itself, the transmission of knowledge, and that my least favorite part is all the administrative / bureaucratic stuff surrounding the act of teaching, such as creating tests, grading them, etc.
(I would even say it allowed me to be more understanding of teachers and lecturers when I later returned to the classroom as an student.)

Second corporate job and second leadership experience

After a bit more than 6 years with DEVOS Inc, I decided to go back to the corporate world again and accepted a position in Farmacias Peruanas at the start of the last quarter of 2019. I started in the role of mobile developer, helping with the transition of their iOS mobile ecommerce app from a WebView running their mobile site to a fully native app. At the start of the next year I was offered the position of Technical Product Owner of one of the development squads, an offer I accepted despite knowing leadership was not my cup of tea because… I thought it was the natural progression of things and didn’t occur to me to say no, basically. Nevertheless, this new position made it necessary for me to gather more knowledge about the company’s digital ecosystem when it came to their ecommerce solution, developed in-house and that encompassed mobile applications both for Android and for iOS, a web ecommerce site and the corresponding supporting back-end services; this knowledge became very useful when, later on, I was entrusted with the task of leading a newly forming development squad, aimed at fulfilling the requirements of the digital marketing department.

Despite my tenure here being shorter than my last one, I think I also learned a great deal here: not only was I able to keep my tech knowledge current because of the technologies being used there (which included Firebase, cloud services through Amazon Web Services, Angular for the web front-end, the latest version of Spring Boot for the back-end services and platforms such as Contentful and Algolia), but I also earned a bit of practical knnowledge of modern software architectures by virtue of having to know almost by heart the architecture of their ecommerce solution (which, at the time I joined the company, was on its way to fully implement a microservices approach). It was also an opportunity to learn a great deal about digital marketing and how analytics are used to gain insights on how people use a web page, the paths they follow and if the campaigns are having the desired results, as well as all the tricks used to ensure and maintain a good position in the search engine results (collectively know as search-engine optimization or SEO). While I did not like at all the constant barrage of deadlines and urgency product of acting as technological support to a digital marketing team, I can say I learned a lot and that my team got a lot of things done to support the work of our users.
(And let’s not forget that the savings I could accrue while working there went a long way in funding my future master’s degree.)

Graduate studies and first international job experience

In the search for a way to steer my career in a more interesting direction, I started looking up master degrees in the field of data science and/or artificial intelligence, both because of their recent relevance and because I genuinely thought those were interesting topics. Through a recommendation from my alma mater, I came across the EDISS (Engineering of Data-intensive Intelligent Software Systems) joint master degree, which caught my eye both because of its focus on connecting software engineering (which I was already familiar to) with data science and artificial intelligence (for which I had great interest but little knowledge), and because it would allow me to experience living abroad in at least two different countries (and living on my own, at least for a while, was a pending personal goal). So, after a good deal of paperwork, I was accepted and moved to Finland at the start of August 2022 (which meant I also had to end my contract with Farmacias Peruanas) to complete the first year of studies at Åbo Akademi, which centered around the foundational topics in data science and artificial intelligence.

After the first year, I was lucky enough to land a summer internship at Nokia, the Finnish company once famous for manufacturing some of the most popular mobile phones, now centered more around networking and communications. My brief stint there as Trainee in the Advanced Technology Group centered around a mobile development project for an application that showcased some of the newest technologies developed by the company, which was a great fit given my already extensive experience in mobile development. Then, on September 2023, I moved to Italy to complete the second year of studies at Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, which centered more around the software engineering of machine learning systems and model-driven software engineering. Finally, on October 2024 I defended my thesis and earned my master degree from UnivAQ, and a month later I received my diploma from Åbo Akademi.

First full-time position abroad

A few months after graduating from my master’s (months in which I tried my hand at the Finnish job market, without success), I was referred to a position in Vorwerk IT Services Ibérica, and after a few more months of paperwork and the move to Spain required by the position, I joined their ranks as a Software Engineer. For the time being my duties align with what is now called “full-stack development”, which just means I can lend a hand both on front-end development tasks (which in this occasion include working with the Stencil framework) and back-end development tasks (which for now include only working with ETL-style processes).