I am a Knowledge Architect|

Origins

San Juan, Puerto Rico

A kid, a screwdriver, a broken machine

In San Juan, before cloud-anything, computers broke - and stayed broken, unless somebody opened the case. By fourteen, I was that somebody, and grown-ups were paying me. My family were business people, Cuban refugees who had rebuilt from nothing. I was the one happiest with the side panel off, already carrying the question that would run the whole story: how do you fit the real world inside a computer?

Origins

Ithaca, New York

A letter arrives

Nobody in my family had considered a place like Cornell - we did not know to aim that high. The letter came anyway. Information science turned out to be an entire discipline built around my question, and I took two degrees from it (BS ’12, MEng ’13). I am still answering that question today, at larger and larger scale.

Engineering

Goldman Sachs · summers 2010–2012

Three summers, one team

The same trade-processing team took me back three summers running - a standing invitation, which in that tower is a letter in itself. Inside lived a legend: SecDB, the bank's in-house risk engine, famous for letting the firm see around corners - written in its own private language, Slang, which exists nowhere else on earth. I learned to speak it.

As an intern I built a reconciliation engine for the new post-crisis regulations, repaired the tool that watches every trade, and wrote an algorithm whose entire job was to watch SecDB itself. It detected changes to the foundations of the machine everyone else trusted blindly.

Engineering

Goldman Sachs · 2013–2015

Where correctness is the whole job

Then the floor itself: Java by day, Slang underneath. I built a query service the whole firm shared and kept hundreds of long-running queries alive at once. I helped stand up a round-the-clock operation too - a hundred-plus people across dozens of teams - that catches errors before they become anyone's worst day. When your software sits between a bank and its regulators, correctness is not a virtue. It is the whole job.

Engineering

ConsenSys · five years

The front door to a new financial world

I joined through the education arm, teaching developers an entirely new way to program, and rose to lead software engineering manager. That put me over every website behind MetaMask and consensys.io - the pages millions of people walked through into an economy that had not existed a decade earlier. Sub-second page loads, measured; a 99% technical SEO score; the web presence of software that guards people's money. That teaches you a professional level of paranoia. I recommend it.

Engineering

Chainlink · three and a half years

The company whose product is an oracle

Chainlink builds the systems that tell blockchains the truth about the outside world - prices, events, facts. The industry's own name for them: oracles. I built the sites and tools its developers rely on - three of those years while still running the web at ConsenSys, both engagements flowing through the research company. The quest was being funded, even when it looked like a day job.

Engineering

Miami · 2023

The handmade supercomputer

Then the models arrived, and I understood what twenty years had been for. I stopped renting my computing and built my own: GPUs racked one at a time on a shelf in my own house, storage I own, models I can open and inspect. Not in a data center. In the house - where the important libraries have always been kept.