Trading Fish The website of Hector Castro

About

I am a technical leader with over a decade of experience designing, building, and scaling resilient cloud-native systems. Proven expertise bridging technical execution with strategic business outcomes, with demonstrated success in both individual contributor and engineering leadership roles. Proficient in AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and observability, with a track record of team building, process transformation, and driving engineering efficiency. Seeking remote opportunities in senior individual contributor or leadership positions.

If you are interested in chatting, please hit me up on 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.