See the live version at https://brain.drmario.tech (look for “CV” on the search box).
tl;dr
Hi!
My name is Mario López and I’ve been working in software engineering for the past 11 years, being a tech lead / engineering manager for the last 6 years, mainly on soft. eng. teams around data platforms. Lately I’ve been managing a cross-functional data team with the Modern Data Stack, and as a software engineer my reference framework has been Django. I consider myself a Product Engineer and I’ve gone through probably the best Product Management program in Spain at Instituto Tramontana. I’ve also helped people getting started on Data Science at MIOTI. Not so long ago, I got a PhD degree cum laude on Telecomm. Engineering from the Technical University of Cartagena (UPCT, 2015), applying different tools from optimization, dynamic programming, stochastic modeling and reinforcement learning to share a scarce resource: the radioelectric spectrum.
Latest experience
Head of Data @ Freepik | June 2023 - Today
Working with an amazing team of data scientists, analysts, and engineers on achieving the lowest possible Time to Reliable Insight about the Freepik world.
Engineering Manager (Data Eng. & Contextual Platform) @ Seedtag | Mar. 2023 - June 23
Sparking millions of ad events… while respecting your privacy.
Data Platform Engineering Manager @ Nextail | July 2022 - Feb. 2023
Nextail provides decision support in fashion retail through the use of data. At Nextail, I’m the engineering manager of the Data Platform team, whose main focus is an in-house tool for IaC for Snowflake.
My experience here was shorter than what I would have wanted to. However, I think that leaving early was a good decision since there were fundamental disagreements on how to work that we weren’t able to spot in the hiring process. And I was able to still have a positive impact, getting my team development back on track, first “Making it work” up to “Making it fast”, mainly by:
- Ruthless prioritization of internal stakeholder requests on a chaotic environment (a migration of the core technologies).
- A proper edge-to-edge fast and comprehensive testing strategy.
- Incremental design / defer commitment to reduce waste.
- Bringing new talent.
- Tech and product mentorization.
Tech stack: Snowflake, Django, Liquibase, DDD
Data Team Manager @ Mercadona Tech | Oct. 2020 - July 2022
Mercadona Online is a leading e-grocer in Spain and Portugal. I have build up a Data function supporting the whole org in very diverse areas (from the e-commerce to logistics), growing the team from 2 data scientists to 8 members with different roles. My main challenges here were:
- Devising from scratch the data strategy of the company (team topology, mission and values…), and pushing towards a responsible data culture.
- Standardizing divergent extract and load processes across all teams.
- Introducing a proper process (Kimball Dimensional modeling) and tool (dbt) to manage data transformations, metrics and their quality, as well as direct support in the transformations of important metrics across the org.
- Explainable demand forecasting at day level in a context of censored demand and short history.
Tech stack: Airbyte, dbt, Big Query, Metabase, Pub-Sub, Prophet
Tech Lead @ Bistrohub | Nov. 2019 - Sept. 2020
Bistrohub is a startup where we want to make it easier for restaurants to manage their orders and menus of multiple delivery platforms from a single UI. My main challenges were:
- Designing a system architecture for today (multi-tenant monolith), but keeping an eye on tomorrow.
- Keeping complexity to a minimum in a rapidly evolving codebase with multiple API integrations.
- Hiring and managing an international team of 4 engineers.
- Since we have no product manager or UX roles, also assuming such responsibilities.
Tech stack: React (Typescript), Django, PostgreSQL, Docker, GCP.
Data Science with Python Lecturer @ MIOTI | Oct. 2017 - Sept. 2020
- I created the syllabus and teach an introduction to data preprocessing with Python, with a satisfaction score of 4,9/5 in the latest evaluation by the students.
- I also teach a summary class on data engineering with Python in the “AI value chain” programme for executives, covering a bit of Kafka, Airflow, Beam, Dask, Prefect…
- I’ve also hosted three meetups with more than 100 attendees each to attract people to our classes:
Tech stack: Jupyter Notebooks, NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, Scrapy
Python Fundamentals Lecturer @ MIOTI | Oct. 2017 - Jun. 2022
I also created the syllabus of the subject “Python Fundamentals” and has been his lecturer for several years.
Platforms Tech Lead @ Unlimiteck | Feb. 2019 - Oct. 2019
Tech lead of the “Platforms” team at Unlimiteck. My team developed the data engineering and data science platforms used by the startups Claridae and Metiora. The main challenges I faced here were:
- Improving the performance of the data science platform to an acceptable level.
- Giving a much needed new coat of paint to the UIs.
- Improving the performance of the data eng. processes.
- Improving the team through recruiting and mentorization.
- Lots of stakeholder communication.
Tech stack: Django, Celery, React, Clickhouse.
Full Stack @ Unlimiteck | Feb. 2017 - Feb. 2019
Managed and developed the insurtech mobile app “junntar”, a cross-platform development in C# (Xamarin) with a Django (Python) backend. The main challenges here were:
- Maintaining a good release cycle (~2 week sprints).
- Building our own analytics solution, gathering the relevant KPIs and showing them in a dashboard.
- Integrating with the major insurance broker of the country.
- UX design. Tech stack: Xamarin, Django.
Software Engineer @ brain-tec AG | Jan. 2016 - Feb. 2017
Custom ERPs modules based on Odoo (open source) for French-Swiss companies. At brain-tec I:
- Successfully dealt with lots of legacy and undocumented code.
- Redesigned the workflows of the companies on Odoo to prevent accounting errors and downtime.
- Redesigned and implemented almost all kinds of reports: sales, payrolls…
- Had direct communication with clients (kind of like a customer success role on top of development). Tech stack: Odoo
Latest education
Product Management Executive Programme @ Instituto Tramontana | 2020
Dossier here An overview of important product management concepts by industry leaders. Lots of interesting people lectured us, such as Jorge Sancha and Sergio Leiva (Tinybird, CartoDB), Carina Szpilka (IngDirect, K Fund…), Justyna Adamczyk (Sketch)…
Information and Comm. Tech. Ph.D. @ Technical University of Cartagena | 2012 - 2015
My thesis title is Coexistence Policies in Cognitive Radio. I was interested in addressing the issues of the coexistence of cognitive radios with existing heterogeneous networks (either cognitive or not) in order to boost the radioelectric spectrum use efficiency.
I employed techniques from Decision Theory and Artificial Intelligence such as Markov Decision Processes, Dynamic Programming, and Reinforcement Learning.
I published articles in journals with high impact index such as the “IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing”, and collaborated with important figures on the area such as the “IEEE Fellow” Michele Zorzi.