Juan Ara - Curriculum Vitae

Don’t forget to check my intro!

Employment History

Software Director - Openbank

January 2023 - April 2024

- Software Director for Brazil
  - Manage complete Brazil Openbank solutions
    - Lead and coach 7 Vertical products
    - Stakeholder and delivery management
    - Roadmap negotiations, technical decisions, hiring Manager
    - People Management
        - Objectives plan, setting up expectations and follow ups
        - Promo cases
        - Challenging conversations... 
    - Help Senior Engineers with architecture and DDD pattens and concepts
    - Hire & Develop engineering lead/management roles
  - As part of the Software Director's group:
    - Define, implement and monitor Software Director's group processes
    - Guardian of company culture, principals and values

Senior Engineering Manager - Cabify

January 2023 - April 2024

- Senior Engineering Manager @ Rider Mobility Team
  - Manage team in charge of Cabify's Rider App (14 people)
    - BFF & Native Apps
    - Other internal Apps and Services
  - Help ~10 engineers to be the best version of themselves
    - 1:1s and tech pairing sessions
    - Objectives plan, setting up expectations and follow ups
    - Promo cases
    - Challenging conversations... 
  - Help Senior Engineers with architecture and DDD pattens and concepts
  - Company culture, principals and values advocate
  - Hire & Develop Engineering roles

Senior Engineering Manager @ Madrid dev hub - Mercadona Online

June 2022 - December 2022

- Senior Engineering Manager Delivery Tribe
  - Acting Team Lead Delivery - Hive 
  - Build & Scale a high performing team to manage routing of more than 100k orders per month 
- Site Owner Engineering Hub Madrid
  - Develop company culture
  - Hire & Growth the best
  - Understand and safeguard the company values

Senior Engineering Manager @ Madrid dev hub - Klarna

August 2021 - August 2022

- Competence Lead for AML & CTF Screening
- Senior Engineering Manager
- Transform a team coming from bad experiences from 3+2 to 7+7+2
- Define the next generation architecture for real time AML & CTF screening in Klarna:
  - Getting ready for next peak season (limits reached previous peak season) 
  - Cost-effective solution for screening & re-screening
  - Cloud Native & highly scalable
- Participate and evolve Madrid Engineering hiring pipeline, focusing on 
  - Candidate experience 
  - Training and coaching of interviewers
  - Process definition
- Define KPIs and culture for the whole AML & CTF domain engineering team

Lead Backend Architect | Mentor | Coach @ Madrid dev hub - lastminute.com

June 2019 - August 2021

- Agile Coach
- Lead Backend Architect
  - Evolutionary Architectures
  - Tech debt assesment
  - Standard and Best Practices definition
  - ADR & Design Documents
  - Cloud Readiness
- Trainer, Speaker
- Smart Working stakeholder
- Bar Raiser on hiring process

Backend Lead Engineer @ Returnly

March 2018 - June 2019

- Build a new team and office (+11 people)
- Backend Tech Lead
  - Virtual wallet payment gateway API Lead Engineer
  - Stripe & Plaid integration for customer data
  - Maintain some docker artifacts (DB, CI Builder)
  - Maintain some legacy services / batch ETLs
- Big Data / MLU Engineer
  - Onboard data scientists into the new hub (+3)
  - Maintain ETL / Pipelines to export to Datavault schemas 

CTO @ Finalbion

March 2016 - March 2018

- Build IT Department
  - New partners, tools, suites, licenses, hardware...
  - Adopt new accounting ERP (Sage X3)
  - Understand and evolve off the shelf factoring solution (Codix)
  - Build reporting tools (internally developed)
  - Grow the department (+4 internal, +3 Outsourced)
- Cloud Migration
- Technology Evangelist

Senior Project Manager @ Midas

January 2009 - March 2016

- IT Manager (6 Months)
  - Define budget, year plan & Team Goals
- Senior Product|Project Manager (EMEA)
  - ERP (Dynamics)
  - CRM (Outsourced, custom made)
  - BI (Qlikview > Cognos > Business Objects)
- IAM & SSO: 15k Identities @ 15 Countries
- EDI: 5 Group Companies @ 15 Countries
- Lead Engineer
- Datacenter manager & SRE | Ops

Architect | Coach @ Hiberus Tecnología

December 2015 - March 2016

- Build QA Department
  - CI Culture, Pipelines (jenkins)
  - Metrics (Sonarqube)
  - Hiring (interns)
- OTA Coach & Architect
  - Lead & Train junior managers
  - Define cloud ready architecture

Previous Experience

2001 - 2009

- 2005-2006 & 2008-2009: Fi2Net: Senior J2EE Engineer & J2EE Lead Engineer
- 2006-2008: Comercial Losan: IT Manager, Project Manager (CRM, SAP ERP)
- 2005-2007: Freelancer Java Architect
- 2001-2005: Java Team Leader & Architect, GIS Specialist

Education and Training

Scrum & Agile Best Practices

Ron Litchy (2018)

- Agile 101
- Scrum
- Agile Best Practices
- Scrum Alternatives

Education Masters Degree

Universidad Alfonso X (2018)

- Pedagogy
- Classroom management
- Coaching
- Psychology

Computer Science Grade

IES Santiago Hernández (2001-2003)

- Programming Languages
- Object Oriented Programming
- SQL and Relational Databases
- Frontend (HTML, Javascript, CSS)
- UML 

Business University Degree

Universidad de Zaragoza (1997-not finished)

(Not finished)
- Accounting
- Micro / Macro economics
- Math, Statistics
- Business & Civil Law

Other Training

- 2007: Oracle 10 Administration I and II
- 2007: Oracle 10 Performance Tunning
- 2005: Linux Network Administration I and II
- 2005: Linux as Web Server
- 2005: Linux integration with Windows
- 2001: Oracle 8i
- 2001: Oracle 8 Forms
- 2001: Oracle 8 Reports

Languages

Spanish

Native

English

Full professional proficiency: APTIS Cert. @ 2018

French

Full professional proficiency: Not actively used since 2017

Other info

Music Teacher (2008-2014)
Mentor at Master FPlaB (2018)
Speaker on several talks on high schools thanks to Fundación ExE
Speaker on meetups / trainings about about Time Management and Blockchain in The Venture City (Madrid, Miami) and Returnly (San Francisco)