Trading Fish The website of Hector Castro

About

I am an engineering lead active in software development, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and software leadership. I enjoy helping teams realize the value of their work by improving the quality and speed of software delivery.

I am interested in remote opportunities and my ideal role is as a tech lead or engineering manager, supporting small to medium-sized teams. If you are interested in chatting, please hit me up on Twitter, Mastodon, or LinkedIn.

What I’ve done

  • I’ve founded web operations/DevOps teams.
  • I’ve set up supporting cloud infrastructure for many types of applications.
  • I’ve troubleshot and improved application performance across the entire software stack.
  • I’ve instituted organization-wide incident response and architecturally significant decision-making procedures.
  • I’ve helped hire software engineers across teams, conducted performance reviews, and aided in peer professional development.
  • I’ve helped improve hiring practices by introducing an apprenticeship program, a structured application assessment, and an on-site interview loop.
  • I’ve assembled cross-functional working groups to address organization-wide issues around business development and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
  • I’ve helped introduce an engineering ladder to provide clarity in a growing engineering organization.

My technical skill set

  • I write code day-to-day in Python, but am also familiar with Ruby, Go, Bash, and TypeScript.
  • I am deeply familiar with how the Django web framework works, but also have a solid understanding of Express, Rails, and Serverless Framework.
  • I am proficient with infrastructure tooling, such as Ansible, AWS SAM, Docker, GitHub Actions, Packer, Terraform, and Vagrant.
  • I have managed multiple production systems in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem and have a strong understanding of API Gateway, Batch, ECS, ElastiCache, IAM, Kinesis, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, and VPC.
  • I have maintained and tuned a wide variety of data stores. I am deeply familiar with PostgreSQL, but also understand how Memcached, MySQL, Redis, and Riak work.