I took a sabbatical for one year to travel around the world. I traveled to 14 countries and pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone by taking lessons to learn new skills, such as Spanish, SCUBA, cooking, and jewelry making, and participating in activities that enriched how I see the world, such as the impact of climate change in the melting glaciers in Peru and bleaching of corals in Indonesia, the respect towards nature that many Indigenous communities have, the diversity of cultures and opinions coexisting in Malaysia, the incredible technological progress in China, among many others that I would need to write a book to tell you about.This experience has made me a more empathetic and resourceful professional in ways beyond the traditional.

I was the tech lead for the subscriptions (recurring payments) team and responsible for end-to-end delivery of our product from new feature design, implementation, testing, rollout, and maintenance.I helped increase the payment volume from $50k/month to over $2M/month by developing features to bring the product from beta to the generally available version on Square's public APIs and first-party products. I primarily worked on the backend systems for the subscription product while collaborating with the front-end and mobile engineers to ensure a cohesive experience across platforms. The main programming language I used was Java, but I wasn't afraid to jump into other parts of the stack (Javascript, Golang, Ruby, and Shell) and suggest and implement improvements to other teams' systems to get things done.As the tech lead, I fostered a culture of collaboration, coaching and mentoring other engineers, and serving as the primary technical point of contact when working with other teams, ensuring a seamless and efficient collaboration. I've also presented our product at conferences (Square Unboxed), interacting with external developers to bring adoption for our APIs (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi4BDUZsuX0 )Beyond my immediate team, I also helped with recruitment, having interviewed over 100+ candidates for multiple teams. I participated in promotion panels for over one year and contributed to the official Square mentorship program by mentoring two engineers from other teams. During our annual hackathon, I conceived of a new product that led to the filing of a new patent.

Leading a cross-functional delivery team of over 20 Developers, Testers, and Scrum Masters. Driving the development of test tools and simulators for the payment industry.• Development of the team and career progression.• Staff recruitment and retention.• Software architect, providing guidance and support to the Scrum teams.• Management of outsourcing contracts with on site and offshore teams.• Create and foster a learning culture in the team.• Hands on Development and Bug-fixing.• Leading Agile transformation in alignment with Development teams in different sites.

Development and design of solutions for payments systems testing based on clients and market needs, focused on terminal certification helping speed up certifications and reducing time to market.• Leading a team of Software Developers, providing guidance during development and coaching new members.• Design and create solutions for clients based on their needs.• Developed payment host simulation system with an average of 200K test transactions per day. • On site delivery of projects assisting clients with UAT, installation and training.• Assist in sales activities, building proposals and participating in pre sales calls and conferences. • Development of online payment systems certification platforms using Java Spring.• Provide internal and external training on the products and Payment technologies.

Development of web based certification platform for payments systems, focused on EMV terminal testing, has been deployed in multiple customers helping speed up certification.• Development of the transaction processing and test case execution engine, in proprietary language (ETDL), dealing with EMV and different types of interchange message specifications such as ISO 8583, XML and APACS.• Java Web application development using Spring, designed for the management of certification projects and displaying of the test case execution verdicts.• Front End development with JQuery, JSP, JavaScript and HTML.• CI/CD using Jenkins.• Customer and Production support

PLATAO Project - Consists of a computerized system aimed at the simulation of air traffic control for the development and training of air traffic controllers. In this project I had the opportunity to perform different tasks in different areas of software development project, such as:• Software development in C language: Consists of the core of the system simulation, it incorporates all the subsystems responsible for the realization and processing of tasks such as flight, radar and other sensors simulation• Software development in Java: Responsible for all of the Human Machine Interface.• Tests: Elaboration of test cases and realization tests in order to verify if the behavior of thesystem is consistent with the software requirements

Experience in two departments:• Service Desk: Service desk management attending intern clients necessities, all focused on ITIL concepts, creation of automatic excel worksheets using VBA, and management of the companys e-mail distribution lists.• Microsoft Support: Windows server installation and management with more than 700 servers, either physical or virtual, among them were: DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Exchange and SQL Server.