Nestor Arocha

Platform Engineer - Iwoca Jun/2018 - Mar/2026

Returning role as assisting team for DevOps or architectural cross system and cross team tasks. Steering direction of the system and data architecture towards more self sufficient teams

• projects: python2 to 3 of existing codebase (>1M LoC), enforcing ownership on gitlab, porting parts of the stack to rust, grpc
• software: Django, python2 to 3, parsers, mypy, rust, pyO3, celery, pydantic, asyncio
• platform: uv, postgres, kafka, temporal.io, gitlab, mongodb, redis
• data: snowflake, chalk, looker
• infrastructure: AWS, docker, kubernetes, terraform, datadog
• documentation: mdBook, notion, confluence, miro

Software Developer - Rightmove Jun/2017 - May/2019

Refactoring of a Python/Django/postgres application to reduce compute time (24h->4h) and integrate with existing Java infrastructure: Enriching anemic domain, improved ORM querying and dataframe handling

• ML: models for customer identification
• marketing: IBM email marketing automation
• platforms: AWS, git, Atlassian, Oracle

CTO - FundingOptions Apr/2014 - Jun/2017

Delivery of the company's technical needs: Technical choices, team management, project delivery, introduction of coding standards, improved codebase quality, size and performance.

• main project: Design and implementation of a lending matching platform that awarded Bank Referral Scheme participation
• other projects: Managing large databases (all UK companies at the time) through SQLAlchemy/MySQL and working with big datasets to reduce latency
• API integrations: (xero, freeagent, sageone, stripe, Companies house)
• software and databases: Django, pyramid, sqlalchemy, celery, mysql, redis, MongoDB
• CRMs: We migrated from CapsuleCRM to Salesforce
• platform: Ansible and AWS EC2 administration

Lead Software developer- Iwoca Feb/2012 - Feb/2014

Scale up of the company infrastructure together with a small team (customer website, administration, database, business logic)

• platform: design and implementation of the CI systems. AWS EC2 administration
• software: Django, twisted, celery, mysql, mongodb, rabbitmq
• API integrations eBay, teletrack, salesforce

Previous roles and projects

• Daedalus (acquired by reddit): Automated Subtitle Alignment application development
  • Hidden Markov Models based speech recognition
  • SailLabs MMI Indexer and Nuance Dragon Naturally speaking
• DTec Biometría: Speech recognition speaker adaptation development
  • Trigram and FSM based language models
  • sphinx3, hg
• Simple Tecnología (1y): Issue/Device/Stock Management Application
  • MySQL database optimization, MYISAM to INNODB engine conversion.
  • PHP4 to PHP5 and Javascript Code Optimization
• Destel Electronics (2y): Development of an Advertising platform Adelin Backup
  • C++, Qt4, Asterisk PBX, git, bzr, svn, linux
• Python grammar DSL library(source)
• DDWRT routers installation, administration and configuration
• Sysadmin tasks with nagios, vpn firewall management, gaming services
• PHP/oscommerce development

• University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
• Second best academic registry of the year 2007 (7,797/10)
• Final year project:
  • Design and development of a teaching oriented interface for R statistical package Source
  • Written in Python, is a QT based GUI for R statistical package. Graded with special distinction