Jesus Gazol

I am a software engineer, technologist and leader with over 20 years of experience.

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Summary

I am a software engineer, technologist and leader with over 20 years of experience building and maintaining software.

I have demonstrated expertise in areas such as lean methodologies, continuous delivery, API design, data pipelines, machine learning, and cloud-native solutions.

I have held positions ranging from DevOps to CTO, and have been responsible for leading and managing teams of developers and engineers.

My experience includes the design of high-performance web applications, development of products based on ML technologies (including NLP, image processing, and social network analysis), and leading technical teams with a focus on software engineering best practices, including continuous delivery and evolutionary architecture.

Main Skills

Lean methodologies, Continuous Delivery, API design, Data pipelines, Machine Learning, Cloud native solutions.

Experience

Tech lead at Volte AS - Energy (Dec 2020 - Now)

Leading the development team at Volte, a B2B energy company. I was the first developer on board, reporting directly to the CTO. Our main product is centered around B2B electricity supply but also serving as an integration platform for other energy products like EV chargers, batteries, solar power, etc…

My responsibilities are:

  • Architecture of the system, setting best practices and development of the team.
  • Ensure that both the systems and the team scale well as our customer base grows.
  • Development of POCs deployed to pilot customers.

Some of the interesting technical projects I have been directly involved:

  • Several integrations against EV chargers like Easee and Zaptec, HVAC systems (EM Systemer) including optimization logic, ElHub (Norwegian central IT system).
  • Rest API for both our web app and as an integration point for our customers.
  • Both batch and real time data ingestion pipelines.
  • Battery size optimization tool.

Main tech used: Python, Django, React, InfluxDb, PostgresDB, Elastic Search, Redis, Databricks, Kubernetes, Helm, Apache Airflow, Terraform, Azure, GitOps, Github actions, microservices, OWASP Zap.

API Lead at Equinor IOC - Ptec (2018 - Nov 2020)

Leading API development of new engineering tools at IOC, consisting of 3 developer teams running Scrum.

The main objective was to develop a product used by ptec engineers for maintenance of all the assets of the company, accounting for +30 assets, thousands of sensors and around 4b datapoints per day.

The main tasks were:

  • Ensure high quality standards in software, improve operations and aligning technical policies across teams. Improve team structures.
  • Rewrite of IOT big data platform moving to a Databricks solution. POC and production environments.
  • Creation of the Machine Learning pipeline for predictive maintenance.
  • Standard architecture for microservice development.

Main tech used: Python, Spark, Azure Event hubs, Apache Airflow, Jira, Azure.

IT Lead at Brainy Inteligencia Semantica - Intelligence (Sep 2016 - Aug 2018)

First engineer of the company, my responsibilities cover both management and technical tasks, eventually leading two teams, 10 total with a mix of Scrum and Kanban. The product was a customizable intelligence platform capable of monitoring and ingesting thousands of sources in text audio and video.

Big Data / Machine Learning:

  • Image search with Tensorflow + Serving + Numpy + Faiss on a 40M image database.
  • Document classification system in Python: Gensim, NLTK, Word2Vec, Sentence2Vec, Xgboost on top of 10M document database.
  • 100s of content spiders.

Software Engineering:

  • Architecture and implementation of NLP platform for competitive intelligence monitoring and information retrieval. Inspired in Hexagonal Architecture, distributed nature using microservices.

Main tech used: AWS, Docker, Ansible, Python, Flask, Redis, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Postgres, Kafka, Django, Jenkins, Nose2, Selenium.

Tech Lead at Funidelia - Retail (April 2014 – May 2016)

Built an end to end analysis and recommendation platform to deliver catalog rankings:

  • Pipeline: RabbitMQ, Sqoop, AWS, Hive, Hadoop jobs, SciPy and Spark.
  • Results: 15% sales growth in test A-B versus default ordering.

Moved infrastructure to GCE, reduced hosting cost by 200% introducing noSqls MongoDb, ElasticSearch, Redis, HAProxy.

Set up the IT team growing from 2 programmers to a cross-functional team of 6, using Scrum for development and Kanban for support. Moved from waterfall to scrum/agile, got rid of huge technical debt speeding up the frontend by 350%.

Several third party integrations across all the chain: product suppliers: catalog, stock and operations, logistics, payment suppliers, marketplaces (Amazon, Ebay, etc), finance system: (MS Navision).

Main tech used: Prestashop, PHP, RabbitMQ, Sqoop, AWS, Hive, MongoDb, Elasticsearch, Redis, HAProxy, Varnish.

DevOps at Zentyal - Software (Aug 2013 – March 2014)

Built private Openstack solution to improve development, QA process and deployment on top of GlusterFS.

Orchestrated deployments with Scalr and Heat + Puppet in Openstack. System allowed continuous integration and per branch testing environments leading to higher product quality.

Main tech used: Scalr, Heat, Puppet, Openstack.

SW Architect at Dagensbedste - Retail (July 2012 – Aug 2013)

Development of core “deal of the day” platform in PHP 5.3, LAMP environment, migration of the mailing system saving 90000 Eur/year.

Improvements in development process (unit and integration testing) leading to continuous integration using Jenkins. Integration with RabbitMQ/Python for asynchronous and heavy tasks, offloading servers and allowing critical services survive database bottlenecks.

Development of a monitoring system based on graphite.

Main tech used: PHP, Mysql, Apache.

CTO Compring.com - Retail (Dec 2011 – June 2012)

Development and deployment of mixed recommender system (content and social based) for flash sales:

  • MongoDb and Pytables for data ingestion.
  • Freeling and ScyPy for data analysis and recommender modelling.
  • Infrastructure migration from traditional data center to Rackspace cloud, saving 50% of costs and improving speed and availability of the site.

Main tech used: MongoDb, Pytables, Scypy.

Software Architect at Barcelona Digital - Smart city (Oct 2011 - Dec 2011)

Liaison with Abertis to develop its smart city concept.

Lead Programmer at iBrands - Marketing (Jun 2009 - Oct 2011)

Set up of programming, support, infrastructure and QA teams managed by SCRUM, in total 7 people.

Architect of core tools at Ibrands.es delivering solutions for mass mailing, BI, affiliation, Ecommerce and offer aggregation among others. Development of a Postfix based mailing system, highly scalable, over 1.5 K mails/s, currently using around 500 ips.

Evangelizer of technologies like MongoDB, Python, Apache Solr and Amazon/Rackspace cloud technology. Evangelizer of lean methodologies, increasing team performance both in quality and timing.

Senior SW Engineer at Milcap - Web (Feb 2007 - May 2009)

Development of in-house customer intelligence system, revamping the financial metrics system. Analysis and development of a transactional engine for multiple e-commerce sites and payment providers. Several CMS driven web applications, LAMP.

SW Engineer and owner at EI Gacela Sport SL - Sports (Sep 2004 - Jan 2007)

Own company, software development, applied mainly to sports. Developed web application to manage track and field competitions and results for Aragon. Development of web app to create training sessions.

IT Executive at Thompson’s Tours - Tourism (Aug 2002 - Sep 2004)

Infrastructure maintenance and planning Development of in-house customer care system based on LAMP Development of several sites.

Education

Online

  • Microsoft Analyzing and visualizing data with Power BI 2019.
  • Microsoft infrastructure as code 2019.
  • Introduction to Recommender Systems, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Big data analysis with Apache Spark, Android Application development 2016.
  • Process Mining 2015.
  • Social Network Analysis, Machine Learning, Intro to data science 2013.

Offline

  • BSc, Business Information Systems, Cardiff University, 2000–2002
  • Hnd, Computing, Universidad San Jorge, Zaragoza, 1998-2000

Interests

Well there are too many to list, here are some examples:

  • AI and data analysis.
  • Lean methodologies.
  • Electrification.