About Me

Technologist, Coach, Lifehacker, Filipino

Strategic technology leader with over 19 years of engineering experience, including 15 years of track record in leading the development and growth of innovative data-intensive products. Adept at translating business strategy into a technical vision, building and guiding collaborative cross-functional teams to deliver solutions and value. Has extensive experience in both software and data architecture, ranging from traditional data warehouses and OLAP to data lakes, modern DW, Lakehouse and from monoliths to microservices, including delivering AI/ML solutions from experiments to inference.

My goal for this blog is to share things I have learned and hopefully be useful for someone else.

Work Experience

Vice President of Engineering

Acquia Inc. | Boston, MA (remote)
12/2019 – 12/2023

Led a team of 100+ engineers and responsible for design, delivery, maintenance and consolidation of various APIs, Services and Applications across a multi-product business unit: Customer Data Platform, Web Personalization, and Marketing Automation.
Spearheaded architectural, data pipeline transformations through a balance of cutting-edge technologies from best-of-breed vendors and in-house enhancements resulting in a modernized multi-cloud architecture (with Snowflake, Databricks, dbt/Coalesce, Kafka, Kubernetes) resulting in 50% reduction in operating cost, as scheduled and with positive impact to quality and service levels.
Collaborated seamlessly with cross-functional teams, bridging the gap between engineering and business stakeholders to ensure alignment on project priorities, business objectives and delivery timelines.
Given extensive knowledge on domain, advised customer C-level leadership on enterprise data strategy, marketing technology and strategy.
Effectively transitioned the organization into a global team, integrating world-class and highly productive team members at our India Centre of Excellence, improving team velocity and product quality and capacity by 50%.
Contributed significantly to the evolution of the product team culture, processes, best practices, fostering a dynamic and collaborative work environment.

Director of Data Engineering and Machine Learning – Customer Data Platform

AgilOne Inc. | Sunnyvale, CA
10/2012 – 12/2019

Oversaw the development and maintenance of robust big data pipeline, ensuring efficient data flow and supporting the organization’s data science initiatives.
Spearheaded the enhancement of data science platform which resulted in more effective ML models which in some cases improved our customer’s marketing effectiveness by over 100% and better data-driven campaigns.
Consulted as a subject matter expert in the optimization of AgilOne’s Spark and Hadoop-based big data infrastructure (ETL, Data Warehouse, BI/Reporting/Analytics), contributing to the reliability and effectiveness of the overall data processing system.
Spearheaded the development and implementation of data security protocols, mitigating risks and fortifying the organization against potential cyber threats, ensuring compliance and meeting industry standards.
Attracted top-tier talent through strategic recruitment efforts, building a team with diverse skills and backgrounds to drive innovation and creativity.
Established and refined PDLC methodologies including agile project management, resulting in a 20% improvement in project delivery efficiency.
Projects included Web Product Recommendations, Power Alerts business outlier/insights, Metrics (reporting), Pathways cohort/funnel analysis, Actions (campaign management), a highly configurable Data Replication Engine, and multiple connectors/3rd party integrations for data enrichment.
As Release Manager, facilitated cross-functional team collaboration to ensure seamless major releases and post-release activities, resulting in minimal customer impact.
As early engineer in a startup, in addition to development had varied responsibility including Cloud operations and deployment as well as customer facing Solutions Architecture.

Director of Software Development and Architecture

LWSMedia Inc. | Philippines
02/2008 – 10/2012

Responsible for the design and implementation of high-quality multi-tier web services and application using .NET and relational databases and provided expert guidance on software development best practices.

Volunteer Experience

Engineering Leadership Mentor

PlatoHQ | US
01/2017 – 06/2022

Participated in over a hundred mentorship sessions with both new and seasoned managers and tech leaders to provide mentoring and guidance to various product, process and people challenges.

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Certified Scrum Master
Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer
Microsoft Certified Business Intelligence Developer

Education

University of St. La Salle
Bachelor of Science | Electronics & Communications
Magna Cum Laude

Skills

Leadership & Team Management
Strategic Planning & Execution
Software Architecture & Design
PDLC & Agile Methodologies – Scrum, Kanban, SAFe
Regulatory Compliance & Risk Management
Stakeholder Communication & Engagement
Innovation & Technology Adoption
Cloud Computing / SaaS B2B Software on AWS, Azure, GCP
Complex Systems Integration
Data Strategy, Modeling, Warehousing, Quality Management and Governance
DevOps, Operations and Observability
Spark, Snowflake, Hadoop, Databricks
C#, Java, Python, Scala, JavaScript

Things I believe makes high-performing teams

Psychological Safety – where everyone feels safe to be authentic, is respectful and is respected
Dependability, Reliability – we say what we do and do what we say
Structure and clarity (or vision/goals) – we know where we’re going
Meaning of work – the work we do is important to ourselves
Impact of work – the work we do has positive impact to others

My Top 5 Strengths

I believe that we create the most value when we do what we do best and partner with others on theirs. Sharing mine below based on CliftonStrengths Assessment:

Connectedness
Relator
Achiever
Learner
Communicator