My name is Omar. I am an all hands-on leader in technology with more than 20 years of experience delivering software as cloud services in both leadership positions and as an individual contributor for a range of projects from start-up level to multinational companies. I am able to contribute in both the Technical and Business side of product development and have wide experience running organizations spread through different countries, as well as raising VC capital and board level interactions.

I have experience developing desktop and web-based applications in different fields such as Financial Services, Online video, Artificial Intelligence, and Tourism; both customer facing and internal, with particular focus in good software engineering practices and code quality.

Regarding Education, I got a Honours degree in Computational Systems Engineering from the Universidad Autonoma de BCS in Mexico, where I specialized in advanced software development. I received my PhD degree at the University of Liverpool, UK, for the research in multi-agent option-trading mechanisms for market-based control of distributed computational systems.

I was active for 7 years in academia during my PhD (thesis) and as a Research Associate in the project PRIMA where I was "work package coordinator" (the person in charge of coordinating the development of agent-based modelling and simulation systems for the project).

Although my main area of expertise is complex and scalabe systems in Finance, I am attracted to solving all kinds of Computer Science and Software Engineering related problems. I enjoy solving complex problems using leading edge technology tools and algorithms (Machine Learning, real time communication, and other cool technologies and algorithms).

One of the things that I enjoy the most, is preaching (including setting the example) the use of "proper" software engineering practices to build good software (i.e., unit testing, CI testing, using [but not abusing] design patterns, code reviewing, etc).

Some of my latest professional experience:

US Startup | B2B SaaS Trust and Crypto Infrastructure Provider - Fintech

April 2021 - PRESENT, Guadalajara, Jalisco. Mexico
VP of AI & Machine Learning [May 2022 - Present]

Reporting the CDO (Chief Data Officer), in charge of developing a team with in-house capabilities for Machine Learning and AI to solve various internal tasks such as Risk and Fraud detection, and user behavior classification. Building leading edge AI and Machine Learning solutions for Finance.

Python, TypeScript, Gremlin, AWS-Neptune, Spark

Lead Technical Architect [April 2021 - May 2022]

Reporting to the CTO, lead the design and implementation of a high-performance Ledger system. Allowing the company to upscale its transactionality from a couple of hundred-per-second transactions to tens of thousands per second. Spearheaded the evolution of the codebase to split a non-scalable monolithic application into a micro-services architecture based on decoupled asynchronous communication. Lead the implementation of Solidity Smart Contracts to secure database transaction history as part of an anonymous Blockchain infrastructure. Served as “resident expert” for mentoring Engineers in the team.

TypeScript, Ruby, Angular, AWS, NodeJS, Solidity, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Ethereum

US Startup | B2B SaaS Payment Network Provider - Fintech

March 2018 - April 2021, Guadalajara, Jalisco. Mexico

VP of Engineering [February 2020 - April 2021]

Reporting to the CEO and in charge of building the technical team, managing the software development process and maintaining the production infrastructure. Building an Engineering team to develop next generation B2B payment cash lifecycle. Heading a team of 10 people.

  • Directed the technical and non-technical aspects of SOC2 and PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance processes in the company, la with the certification of the company in both standards.
  • Taking the Engineering team into the next organizational level by defining ownership verticals aligned with the business.
  • Improved infrastructure efficiency and reduced costs of AWS services by 30% through various technical and non-technical optimizations.

NodeJS, Angular, AWS, MySQL, TypeScript, Ionic, RabbitMQ, Solidity, ElasticSearch, CloudFlare

Head of Product [October 2018 - January 2020 ]

As Head of Product, implement the CEO’s product vision ensuring communication between internal stakeholders. Responsible for the Product and Engineering teams to the Board of Directors during Quarterly Board Meetings. In charge of building the Product Team by hiring a Product Manager, a UX Designer and a Director of Product.

  • Designed and developed the initial version of the second company product (Expense Management through Virtual Cards).
  • Implemented an additional acquisition channel to improve customer acquisition.

JIRA, HubSpot, Google Analytics, GSuite, Ruby

Director of Engineering [march 2018 - January 2020]

As the 1st local employee, opened and managed Guadalajara’s Office. Responsible for managing the local Engineering team.

  • Developed and Implemented a recruitment plan to grow the Mexico team from 1 to 15 people.
  • Standardized the technical recruitment process improving its lifecycle.
  • Spearheaded the adoption of technologies to improve the efficiency of our production systems, decreasing web application response times.

NodeJS, Angular, AWS, MySQL, TypeScript, Ionic, PHP, RabbitMQ, Nginx

Mexican Startup | Consumer Online Lending for Mexico - Fintech

January 2014 -February 2018, Guadalajara, Jalisco. Mexico</sup

Sr. Director of Engineering [May 2016 - Feb 2018]

Reporting to the CEO. Built the technology of one of Mexico’s top FinTech companies. Grew the Technology team from 5 to 20 people. Taking the tech team mentality from heroics to planned and predictable processes.

  • Set up an org chart within teams as the company grew,
  • Establishing the Operations (DevOps + IT), QA and SecComp (Security and Compliance) teams under the Engineering department.
  • Spearheaded the evolution of the technology platform from a monolithic framework to a highly scalable microservices based infrastructure. This allowed our systems to handle the 10x growth in traffic that the business experienced.
  • In charge of implementing processes and system improvements to achieve ISO 27001 (Information security) and ISO 37001 (Anti-Bribery).
  • Performed road trip with the CEO to raise a successful Series A.

Ruby, C++, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML,CSS, AWS

Director of Analytics [Sep 2015 - Apr 2016]

Reporting to the CEO. Built and managed the Data Science team in charge of developing the core Risk Assessment models and loan evaluation platform. Led the Analytics team which had the responsibility of building models that allowed the company to reduce the credit default enough to have suitable financials to raise a Series A.

  • Set up a team of Data Scientists and a Data Engineers to implement the full life cycle of model development from data collections and analysis to the parameterization and integration of the models into production environments.

R, Python, Hadoop, CERN-Root, Ruby

Technology Specialist/First Engineer [Jan 2015 - Aug 2015]

Reporting to the CTO. As the first Engineer of the Startup, helped in the development of all the systems such as frontend, backend and infrastructure. Performed several support such as customer support, product development, programming, and technical support.

  • Productionized Machine Learning models, interfacing them with our production environment to enable automated risk scoring of loan applications.

Ruby, C++, JavaScript, HTML,CSS, AWS, MongoDB

US Startup | B2B Online Platform Video Provider - Streaming

April 2012 - December 2013, Guadalajara, Jalisco. Mexico,

Sr. Software Engineer

Reporting to the Head of Professional Services. Part of the Professional Services Group which built custom solutions to match our clients' video vision. Helped clients create the best possible experience for their video products and experience.

  • Developed custom Flash players for large multimedia and content companies.
  • Implemented On Demand Video platforms (similar to Netflix Video platform).

Python, Ruby, PHP, ActionScript3, JavaScript, ElasticSearch

Programming

I've had the chance to work with a whole load of programming languages and technologies; these are listed here.

Programming Languages
Fluent: TypeScript, Ruby, Javascript, Python, Shell Scripting (Linux Bash)
Have worked with: C, ActionScript, C#, C++ , SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL and MS SQL server), PHP, Python. Assembler (80x86), ... among others that escape me.

Other technologies I am familiar with:
Docker, Vagrant, Ionic, Angular, React, AWS stack, Serverless, Airflow

At some point I am going to make a list of all the technologies that I have used for one thing or another...