Alejandro Barrientos
{ barreeyentos }
> About
I'm a Software Engineer with a strong drive to create quality software that is production ready. I enjoy leading teams that are highly motivated and whom love to move quickly and challenge my skills.
Having a background in both big corporations and small startups I bring with me a unique balance between enterprise design and startup scale/cost/releases. Although mainly a backend engineer, my interests spread into frontend, AWS automation, deployment piplines and software process principals.
Alejandro Barrientos
Software Engineer
San Diego, CA
Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.
I believe that the most productive teams are those that have great communication and that enable the quick spread of knowledge. These are the types of teams I want to work in and help create so that I can learn from others and at the same time teach them what I know.
> Experience
Jobs
Intuit
Staff Software Engineer
May 2018 - Present
A venture back to established enterprise work, at Intuit I get to help modernize a codebase that millions of people use. More to come on the progress...
Zeeto.io
Technical Lead
Sept 2016 - May 2018
Here at Zeeto, Inc. I have been able to use all the skills learned in my previous positions to join a team in the early stages of a complete rewrite of a legacy system. Here I got to teach junior engineers the tips and tricks of writing enterprise quality code but staying very lean and agile. Being able to rewrite everything use Node/React and Spring Boot apps in a containerized environment in AWS was very fun and challenging. Being on the forefront of technology, especially Kafka Streaming Apps, allowed for great design but with lots of unknown ground leading to challenging research and debugging.
Gimbal, Inc
Director, Engineering
May 2014 - Sept 2016
Gimbal, Inc. was a divestiture from Qualcomm, Inc. A handful of employees from the Qualcomm team took over the product and continued building the contextually aware platform. At Gimbal, Inc, I learned what it truly meant to be in "start-up" mode. We rebuilt all of our services infrastructure within AWS and rewrote all services to be more cost efficient and scalable. I had the opportunity to learn from some great leaders who were able to build a great engineering culture that built enterprise-grade systems on a start-up cost. We acheived great efficiency by having engineers who were motivated to be full stack engineers and were able to provide services that scaled to tens of millions of active users a month. Here I learned how to build an engineering team that can support a growing business.
Qualcomm, Inc. - QLabs
Staff Engineer
Jan 2013 - May 2014
Within QLabs I joined the Fyx team which started as an R&D project using small Bluetooth 4.0 devices to provide proximity context to applications. Here I learned how to work in a small traditional Agile team along with expanding my skillset to develop Java backend services, Ruby on Rails web services, along with Android and iOS SDKs and applications. During my stint in QLabs Fyx was merged with the Gimbal team which at the time was a Geofencing platform. Together it turned into a context aware platform helping create relevant messaging to applications based on coarse grained geofencing location and fine grained proximity location using bluetooth beacons.
Qualcomm, Inc. - QIS
Senior Engineer
Jan 2007 - Jan 2013
I had a great experience as a member of the QChat engineering team. I experienced traditional software development cycles first hand; end to end Waterfall practices from System Engineers hashing out desings, feature estimates, development, QA and production releases. Here I was able to learn the engineering skills needed to create software that could establish sub-second VoIP calls, and that was five nines reliable. More importantly I learned a great deal on how to write distributed systems that maintain availability during large rolling deployments across geographically redundant locations.
The Scripps Research Institute
Programmer
Mar 2005 - Dec 2006
Although this was a part-time college job, I ended up learning more about software than I knew at the time. I maintained and developed in-house porprietary EEG software that had a Java Swing front end and created analytics using a JNI library that interfaced with Matlab. Here I learned that getting an end-users input on UI saves ten-fold the amount of time than writing it, then rewriting it to be usable.
Education
UC San Diego
Sixth College
Sept 2003 - Dec 2006
B.S. Computer Science - Cum Laude
Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society
Coursera
Dec 2017 - Feb 2018
Machine Learning by Stanford University on Coursera.
Certificate earned at Sunday, February 11, 2018 4:52 AM GMT
Patents
United States 9,083,772
Issued August, 2015
In an embodiment, a communications device exchanges, between first and second access terminals, higher priority data in association with a communication session of a first type and also lower priority data in association with a communication session of a second type...
United States 9,100,459
Issued July, 2015
In an embodiment, objects are downloaded to an access terminal (AT) based on which window(s) are prominently displayed on the AT...
> Skills - Technologies
I first learned Java back in 2000 and have watched it change. Still catching up with Java 9.
This fast changing technology has been fun to learn and deploy (along with debug). Trying to keep up with container orchestration software has been a whirlwind but my current call is Kubernetes with great hope for AWS's EKS and Fargate
Looks like magic but makes managing and creating production Java web services so easy.
Hated it at first but really have come to appreciate the results it creates. Finding that balance of integration to unit test is the hardest.
Spent years leading scrum teams, managing Jira, and cleaning up backlogs as well as eliciting requirements and good ol fashioned poker planning.
Being able to describe technical problems and solutions with Product/Sales/Support and other engineers has helped my excel in my career.
Helping other engineers grow their careers by figuring out their strong suites and helping improve the others is very enjoyable to me.
I've been working with AWS services since 2014 and its been a part time job trying to keep up.
Learning the APIs was the easy part, deploying and managing a cluster - not so much. At least now with so much more community support it has become a great tool to build up event-based services/ streaming analytics/ and simple reliable distributed messaging.
iOS(Swift), Android(Kotlin), C++, C, JS
Golang, Octave, Python
MySQL, Postgres, Influx, Grafana, Redis, RabbitMQ, Ansible