Juan Ara

I’ve been a senior software engineer, back-end techlead and lead architect in Madrid. Now I’m Software Director working at Openbank. Loving gaming and motorbikes. Writing software since I was 9. Since 1987 ;-)

TLDR;>

engineering manager | backend | architect | coach

engineering {
    kotlin.also {
        jvm*
        gradle
        spring + springboot
    }
    monitoring {
        grafana, prometheus, graphite, datadog, sleuth
    }
}

virtualization = { docker, k8s, kvm, xen }

cloud = { aws, gcloud }

architecture = { 
    microservices, 
    serverless, 
    apis, 
    event-driven, 
    event-sourcing, 
    datavault, 
    ddd,
    cqrs
}

ci/cd = { buildkite, spinaker, jenkins, 'github actions', 'gitlab-ci' }

softskills = { 
    leadership, 
    mentoring,
    coaching,
    growth mindset,
    execution
}

Learning | Trying

elixir
golang
lua
k8s
ktor
ruby
jekyll

Cover Letter

Intro

My first contact with tech and computers was thanks to my old man, who brought an Amstrad CPC 464 when I was eight years old. What he thought was the computer manual “40 Educational Games for the Amstrad” was actually my first programming experience.

Since then, I have been surrounded by technology, my passion. I have been lucky enough to be able to break things, to understand them, to get carried away by my curiosity without being afraid. I became an analytic person, with ease to quickly understand problems and see their impact and ramifications. Because of that, I am usually found near product teams but with a strong technical background to help engineering teams to solve problems with the right technology at a given moment.

As anyone, when I am passionate about something, I get absorbed and I love talking about it. In special, science but particularly technology, engineering and space. This passion made me during my journey to find time to share my experiences, learnings, take overs or the results of my experiments, be it during informal office talks, on social media (medium, twitter) or meetups.

I believe that there is a time in life when you have packed enough experiences backpack or above your shoulders that you have to share, to help others to learn from our mistakes (or just learning that failure itself is not the end of the world!) and I have donated part of my time the last four or five years collaborating with non profit orgs, focused on education, be it as speaker on universities / high schools or as coach and mentor on specific projects.

What do I do

I have been a CTO, Senior Engineering Manager, Lead Architect, Lead Engineer, Tech Lead, Coach and Mentor. I’m always hands on with the code and I work near the product teams.

What do I like

I enjoy working in a diverse environment, with a strong culture and values close to mine. Transparency, honesty, ownership and effort. I always loved “who first then what”, even when looking for new employees as when looking for a new job myself. Social Responsibility is always a plus for me, be it company or personal level.

I believe in flexibility, mainly because everyone’s different and even same individuals are different on different days, but I also think it is important to be available when your team needs you. In addition, engineering is a form of craftsmanship which involves creativity, and most of the time you don’t really know when the creativity will arrive since it doesn’t speak schedules.

I also believe in continuous improvement, especially with the current pace in our sector. Research and Innovation is constantly happening but it cannot truly happen if there is no knowledge sharing inside the company. I am an agile enthusiast and I love high performing teams.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership: Helping teams to grow by offering technical guidance, specifically in my area of expertise
  • Change Enabler: Making change to happen, by continuously evaluating philosophy and culture, procedures, technical stack, procedures, best practices, and standards
  • Growth Mindset: Study, learn, understand and share knowledge from product to engineering. Helping to understand what is the impact of every user story, but also helping to understand product managers the impact of each design decision, architecture model or pattern, or solution.
  • Speaker: Participate in seminars, meetups, or brown-bags and encourage others to do the same, pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone, in order to learn new points of view or technologies.

Personal Achievements

  • Transform a team coming from toxic experiences from 3 engineers +2 consultants to three high performing teams (7+7+2) (+90 pulse survey)
  • Define the next generation architecture for the real time screening backbone in Klarna, getting ready for next peak season. The limits of the legacy architecture were already met the previous peak season
  • Become the most loved bar raiser in Madrid Engineering pipeline, focused in Candidate Experience.
  • Scale and migrate upper funnel on lastminute.com OTA, evolving the service architecture into a domain based microservice cloud-ready architecture.
  • Payment Gateway Lead engineer (e-Wallet) at Returnly, enabling the company to remove dependency on gift cards and voucher codes on a transaction value of 300M USD/year
  • Learn a new stack (Kotlin, Kinesis, Spring Boot, Dropwizard…) becoming Backend Lead Engineer by example in only six months.
  • Understand both technically and functionally the product of an American Startup and, as second spanish employee, transfer the knowledge to a team of 15 engineers in a year. Help to hire and build that team.
  • Build the technology department of a Fintech in just a year. Maintain the off the shelf software inherited and design new ERP and Factoring systems. That company grew from transactions valued at 600M/year to 1.2M/year.
  • Migrate all infrastructure from on-premise to a hybrid cloud with 40% TCO reduction in only three months. Migrate after to fully cloud in a month.
  • Launch a IAM / SSO proof of concept project locally (Spain) and get the whole company onboarded on the solution. Lead the project in EMEA to manage more than 15000 identities in 15 countries. Repeat it again with an EDI project.
  • Define and develop BI solutions for annual sales reports on a franchising company..
  • Learn GIS and build the team that became the most important one in a small aragonese software company that became invited as speakers to ESRI conferences.
  • Collaborate on some open source projects (flyway, jasperreports, struts-shale, minimal-mistakes jekyll theme…)

Hard Skills

How can I help you?

If you think I can help you and you have read almost all above, then just contact me. By this point probably you know me well and it’s possible we can find a way to collaborate. There are links to my social profiles at the bottom!

CV

Navigate through my online  Curriculum Vitae