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Curriculum Vitae of Alex Fernández

Email: alexfernandeznpm@gmail.com

Developer with 20+ years of experience specialized in scalability and DevOps, invested in helping teams become top performers. I have participated in most stages of tech startups, including founding, hypergrowth, scale-up and acquisition.

Location: currently residing in Madrid, Spain.

Job History

I have programmed professionally using C, Java, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, and Go. Code that I have written routinely processes millions of requests per second. I have also held several management positions as director and CTO, leading high performance teams. Please find below my most relevant engagements, full history at LinkedIn.

2023-10 to 2024-10: Backend Developer at Tinybird

Worked in the ingestion team digesting many petabytes of data per month.

  • Refined and evolved the architecture to ingest 10+ terabytes per hour.
  • Improved stability and scalability with traffic growing 3x per year.

2022-09 to 2023-08: Cofounder and CTO at Ntrde

Co-founded NTRDE with two business partners, a decision intelligence solution for chemical trading.

  • Took an early prototype and converted it into an enterprise-ready solution.
  • Did product design for two pilots with customers.

2021-01 to 2022-06: CTO at Hivency

In 2021 I joined Hivency, a French influencer marketing company.

  • Led a team of French and Spanish professionals, helping them evolve the best solution in influencer marketing worldwide.
  • Reorganized the team to work in squads and improved internal practices.
  • Secured a successful multi-million acquisition process by a French group.

2020-02 to 2020-12: Freelancer

In 2020 I collaborated full time with LeanMind optimizing a system that generated invoices for 1M+ customers. We reduced running time of the invoicing system from a full week to about four hours.

Since 2012 I have worked sporadically as a freelancer, mostly doing backend development in Node.js, and have specialized in the areas of DevOps and scalability. Customers include: Grupo Inditex, M&C Saatchi, TUI Group, and a few other smaller companies.

2017-10 to 2019-03: Backend Engineer at Devo

I joined Devo in the middle of an impressive international expansion.

  • Wrote very demanding Node.js code for data ingestion, supporting peaks of 3.5 million events per second.
  • Wrote a patch that was included in the Node.js core, and which resulted in a 2x speedup in secure socket communications.
  • Helped keep developer environments up and running.

2013-01 to 2017-09: Backend Lead at mediasmart.io

Led the backend team at mediasmart.io, a mobile adtech company. During this period of hypergrowth the company went from 50k€ to 10M€ in revenue.

  • Led the redesign that allowed us to go from processing two thousand requests per second to just under a million requests per second in little more than four years.
  • Successfully competed at an international level both in price and in features.
  • Designed the selection process used for all new recruits.
  • Built a SRE platform that fully automated deployments, server provisioning, monitoring and much more.

2007-07 to 2011-08: Project Manager at ING Direct Spain

I coordinated a group of up to 15 developers.

  • Technical responsible for financial cards.
  • Led development for internal projects (such as HalCash) in record time.
  • Ensured performance of card operations during peak transaction days.

2001-08 to 2005-03: Analyst at Ibermática, SA

I worked at the Applied Research department managing and developing European projects for the Fifth and Sixth Framework Programmes.

  • Created an intelligent agent platform in Java that was reused for several projects.
  • Technical lead for InfoCitizen, an European project for sharing census documentation across Europe.
  • Attended several conferences and presented European projects in academic circles.

Volunteer Work

I have also collaborated with a few initiatives as a volunteer.

Open Source Projects

The most popular project at 2.5k stars is loadtest, a Node.js library widely used for load testing web applications. Other projects can be found in my GitHub account.

Public Speaking

I have extensive experience as a public speaker, including conferences in many European countries.

Organizations

From 2015 to 2019 I was the main organizer of MadridJS and Node.js Madrid, two of the biggest JavaScript meetups in Spain. I set up in excess of 100 meetups with speakers from all over the world.

I have helped organize three editions of the volunteer conference JSDayES, the last one in 2017 with around 600 attendees and featuring 35 speakers from over 10 countries.

Education

I greatly enjoy teaching and learning, and have often been involved with the education sector.

Physics Degree

I graduated in Physics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Teaching

Contact

Last edited on 2023-08-08.

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