From Santiago to New York City, a first-gen kid's path through Brooklyn, college, and a career in tech.

origin · 1983

Santiago, Dominican Republic

Born in Santiago. Left the island at 5 years old.

ROOTS ✓
relocate · 1988

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Landed in one of Brooklyn's most vibrant immigrant neighborhoods. Grew up resourceful. You learn to figure things out when you have to. The kind of place that teaches you to hustle.

NYC ✓
// getting started
internship · spring 2005

Human Resource Administration

Supported 3 on-site software engineers by logging user-reported issues and deploying system patches to computers across New York City.

education · 2001–2005

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

First-gen college graduate with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems. Graduated Cum Laude with Dean's List honors.

CIS · CUM LAUDE
internship · 2005–2006 · the spark

Department of Health

Got hands-on experience building with VB.NET, ASP.NET, and SQL. The first time writing real code for a real system. That was it.

⚡ CAREER PIVOT DETECTED
// career
first role · 2006–2009

Software Engineer, Verified Person

Built HR-XML integrations, rewrote a legacy VB.NET app to C# on .NET 2.0, and created utilities that cut data processing time from over an hour to seconds.

SHIPPED ✓
senior · 2009–2014

Senior Software Engineer, Professional Examination Service

Built ProExam Write, a Rails SaaS platform for high-stakes certification exams. Migrated from SQL Server to PostgreSQL, created the open_xml Ruby gem, implemented real-time field-level encryption, and cut survey processing from 8 hours to 49 minutes.

▲ RANK UP
concurrent · 2014–2017

Senior Software Engineer, CARMA

Managed AWS infrastructure for a Lucene-based NLP pipeline. Built a Sidekiq-powered newsletter system delivering 5,000 articles to 13,000 recipients in under 5 minutes.

SHIPPED ✓
concurrent · 2014–2020

VP of Big Data Infrastructure, Accern

Moved from application code to owning all infrastructure. Built and scaled the data platform from MVP through Series A across AWS, GCP, Azure, and DigitalOcean. Saved $60K in compute with a custom GCP Scaler API and built "BB8," a Slack bot for on-demand deployments.

⚡ PIVOT ENGAGED
senior · 2020

AVP, Senior Cloud Engineer, Allied World

Modernized engineering practices by building cloud-native IaC tooling with Terragrunt/Terraform. Created a custom CI/CD CodePipeline module that saved thousands of manual person-hours by automating plan on PR open and apply on merge.

SHIPPED ✓
promoted · 2023

AVP, Lead Cloud Engineer, Allied World

Built and led a distributed cloud engineering team. Replaced AWS-only CI/CD with a Unified DevOps Framework powered by GitHub Actions, adopted company-wide. Achieved a 5x productivity increase over individual contributions.

▲ RANK UP
// now
unlocked · 2026

Agentic DevOps Engineering

Building at the intersection of AI agents and DevOps. Agentic workflows, LLMs, and the next generation of intelligent infrastructure.

UNLOCKED ✓