Juan Ara - Curriculum Vitae

Don’t forget to check my intro!

Employment History

Software Director - Openbank

April 2024

- Software Director for Brazil & Chile
  - Manage complete Santander App solutions
    - Lead and coach 7 Vertical products
    - Stakeholder and delivery management
    - Roadmap negotiations, technical decisions, Hiring Manager
    - People Management
      - Objectives plan, setting up expectations and follow ups
      - Career progression management
       - Conflict resolution and performance coaching
    - Help Senior Engineers with architecture and DDD patterns and concepts
    - Hiring & Performance Management
  - As part of the Software Director's group:
    - Define, implement and monitor Software Director's group processes
    - Guardian of company culture, principles and values

Senior Engineering Manager - Cabify

January 2023 - April 2024

- Senior Engineering Manager @ Rider Mobility Team
  - Managed team in charge of Cabify's Rider App (14 people)
    - BFF & Native Apps
    - Other internal Apps and Services
  - Helped ~10 engineers to be the best version of themselves
    - 1:1s and tech pairing sessions
    - Objectives plan, setting up expectations and follow ups
    - Performance management and conflict resolution
  - Helped Senior Engineers with architecture and DDD patterns and concepts
  - Company culture, principles and values advocate
  - Hired & Developed Engineering roles

Senior Engineering Manager @ Madrid dev hub - Klarna

August 2021 - Dec 2022

- Competence Lead for AML & CTF Screening
- Senior Engineering Manager
- Scaled the team from 5 to 16 members, optimizing the ratio of Engineers, QA, and Leads
- Defined the next generation architecture for real time AML & CTF screening in Klarna:
  - Getting ready for next peak season (limits reached previous peak season)
  - Cost-effective solution for screening & re-screening
  - Cloud Native & highly scalable
- Participated in and evolved Madrid Engineering hiring pipeline, focusing on
  - Candidate experience
  - Training and coaching of interviewers
  - Process definition
- Defined KPIs and culture for the whole AML & CTF domain engineering team

Lead Backend Architect | Mentor | Coach @ Madrid dev hub - lastminute.com

June 2019 - August 2021

- Agile Coach
- Lead Backend Architect
  - Evolutionary Architectures
  - Tech debt assessment
  - Standard and Best Practices definition
  - ADR & Design Documents
  - Cloud Readiness
- Trainer, Speaker
- Smart Working stakeholder
- Acted as Bar Raiser on hiring process

Backend Lead Engineer @ Returnly

March 2018 - June 2019

- Built a new team and office (+11 people)
- Backend Tech Lead
  - Virtual wallet payment gateway API Lead Engineer
  - Stripe & Plaid integration for customer data
  - Maintained docker artifacts (DB, CI Builder)
  - Maintained legacy services / batch ETLs
- Big Data / MLU Engineer
  - Onboarded data scientists into the new hub (+3)
  - Maintained ETL / Pipelines to export to Datavault schemas 

CTO @ Finalbion

March 2016 - March 2018

- Built IT Department
  - New partners, tools, suites, licenses, hardware...
  - Adopted new accounting ERP (Sage X3)
  - Understood and evolved off the shelf factoring solution (Codix)
  - Built reporting tools (internally developed)
  - Grew the department (+4 internal, +3 Outsourced)
- Cloud Migration
- Technology Evangelist

Previous Experience

2001 - 2015

- 2015: Hiberus Tech.: Architect & Coach
- 2009-2016: Midas: Sr IT Project Manager
- 2005-2006 & 2008-2009: Fi2Net: Senior J2EE Engineer & J2EE Lead Engineer
- 2006-2008: Comercial Losan: IT Manager, Project Manager (CRM, SAP ERP)
- 2005-2007: Freelancer Java Architect
- 2001-2005: Java Team Leader & Architect, GIS Specialist

Education and Training

Scrum & Agile Best Practices

Ron Litchy (2018)

- Agile 101
- Scrum
- Agile Best Practices
- Scrum Alternatives

Computer Science Grade

IES Santiago Hernández (2001-2003)

- Programming Languages
- Object Oriented Programming
- SQL and Relational Databases
- Frontend (HTML, Javascript, CSS)
- UML 

Business University Degree

Universidad de Zaragoza (1997–2001, 3/5 years completed)

- Accounting
- Micro / Macro economics
- Math, Statistics
- Business & Civil Law

Other Training

-2018: Universidad Alfonso X | **Education Masters Degree**
- 2007: Oracle 10 Administration I and II
- 2007: Oracle 10 Performance Tunning
- 2005: Linux Network Administration I and II
- 2005: Linux as Web Server
- 2005: Linux integration with Windows
- 2001: Oracle 8i
- 2001: Oracle 8 Forms
- 2001: Oracle 8 Reports

Languages

Spanish

Native

English

Full professional proficiency: APTIS Cert. @ 2018

French

Full professional proficiency: Not actively used since 2017

Other info

Music Teacher (2008-2014)
Mentor at Master FPlaB (2018)
Speaker on several talks on high schools thanks to Fundación ExE
Speaker on meetups / trainings about about Time Management and Blockchain in The Venture City (Madrid, Miami) and Returnly (San Francisco)