Ben Orozco
Hands-on VP Eng/CTO with strong software engineering roots and technical generalist mindset with a trajectory across U.S. & LatAm. Product-minded builder with startup DNA, shipping and scaling products and teams from 0 to 1 and 1 to 100, staying close to code, architecture, product, UI/UX design and delivery across backend, frontend, infrastructure and AI. Experienced hiring manager and technical leader with high energy, ownership thriving in ambiguity, execution speed and strategic leadership enabling engineering orgs with practical AI tooling across agentic workflows.
Experience
Apptegy — apptegy.com
Industry-leading EdTech SaaS company with 6,000+ school districts in the US & Canada and 10MM+ of active users.
VP of Engineering
- Help hiring, forming & leading a team of 140+ Engineers on both sides of the border by building a high-performance yet thoughtful engineering culture. Enabler for growth & learning, facilitating continuous improvement and seek of excellence.
- Participated in organizational restructuring when transitioning to a mature scale-up company towards Series-C 100MM+ ARR, focusing on strategy, planning, and execution of established processes, implementing org restructuring, planning frameworks, and delivery systems for sustained high-growth.
- Lead AI enablement projects across the Engineering organization, advocating adoption & best practices for tools such as Cursor, Claude, CodeRabbit, Gemini, etc. which lead to a 10% increase in productivity and 60% reduction in code review time.
- Led architecting & shipping of multiple high-impact services & products with consistent cadence & quality, ensuring uptime and scalability for millions of end-users.
- Advocated a significant cost-reduction, simplification & refactoring of gRPC-based microservices architecture & in-house frameworks following Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
Lead Software Engineer
- Hands-on development of Thrillshare platform and APIs mainly in Ruby on Rails, supporting Vue.js & Mobile (iOS & Android) clients.
- Advocate best design, architecture, coding practices, peer reviewing & unit testing across the Engineering organization
- Developed greenfield Ruby on Rails outpost services following SOA (service-oriented architecture):
- Auth: With a constant inflow of 1,000's of new users, implemented an AuthN/Z identity provider based on OAuth2 & OpenID Connect standards to support SSO (Single Sign-on) and User Management across existing and newer Apptegy's products
- Alerts: Due to a spike in usage of our alerting services, from 10's to 1,000's of notifications per minute, we required to scale it up by implementing a Multi-channel (SMS/Voice/TTS/Push), multi-provider (Twilio, Sendgrid, Facebook, Twitter) & multi-language relay service for school district notifications
- Among other projects I lead: Forms & surveys builder, ETL pipeline revamp, Translation service, Emails newsletters & marketing campaigns, Learning-management-system & Real-time horizontally-scalable Chat messaging system
- Supporting Micro-services built with Ruby, Roda micro-framework & Sidekiq: Analytics, Data Management, Translations, Learning Management System.
- DevOps, CI/CD and release managment deploying in AWS: EC2, ELB, EKS, RDS, S3 clusters using Capistrano & Kubernetes
- Scrum master working with Product team following Agile methodologies.
- Interview backend & full-stack candidates while onboarding new hires.
Brokerlit — brokerlit.com
Real Estate SaaS providing an MLS, CMS & CRM platform for brokers to manage their properties and inbound leads generation.
Technical Co-Founder
- Hands-on development of the platform in Ruby on Rails & Typescript/React.js/Next.js
- DevOps infrastructure based on Fly.io k8s service & Vercel serverless hosting
BaseQL — baseql.com
GraphQL access point for your Cloud data (Airtable & Google Sheets). 🎯 Acquired in 2024
HealthTree — healthtree.org
Healthcare platform for cancer patients, their families and caregivers, with the mission of accelerating the finding of a cure
CTO
- Put together development team and processes for backend APIs in Ruby on Rails, frontend clients in React.js & data pipelines by hands-on programming, code reviewing & testing.
- Automated products lifecycle via DevOps & Continuous Integration/Delivery pipelines.
- Increased customer feedback awareness and success metrics by creating support & analytics infrastructure in: Metabase Sentry Intercom
- Created a product development pipeline from scratch to priotitize and measure performance using Agile Kanban methodology in Trello
- Decreased bugs and improved overall quality via technical leadership & mentoring to achieve continuous improvement as a team
- Defined a Technology Strategy and Software Architecture aligned with product vision
- Recruited and retained top talent in a competitive U.S. market
Ecaresoft — ecaresoft.com
EHR & HIS systems for hospitals and clinics in Latin America and Middle East.
CTO
- Technology strategy and software architecture
- Succesfully launched internationalization for new markets via APIs, Microservices and serverless Lambda functions using.
- Achieved high availability and resilience cloud architecture by relying on DevOps, elastic infrastructure, containerization, automated testing and CI/CD pipelines for continuous quality and delivery with.
- Product development and operations
- Improved roadmap priorization and improved performance measurement of dev teams by adopting SCRUM & Kanban Agile software development methodologies
- Increased customer feedback awareness and success metrics by creating support & analytics infrastructure in: Metabase Sentry Intercom
- Achieved continuous improvement via OKRs, Performance Reviews and One-on-ones
- Recruited and succesfully retained top talent that added value to the company
CTO — Nimbo — Nimbo / nimbo-x.com
- Established development processes for coding, reviewing & testing Ruby on Rails backend APIs and Ember.js frontend clients
- Defined Software Architecture and launched fault-tolerant APIs and microservices in Ruby, Java, PostgreSQL, Redis and Sidekiq for background processing
- Drugs interactions service based on Wolters Kluwer's Medi-Span®
- Machine Learning prediction & classification service based on Python & Tensorflow
- Full-text search service based on Apache Solr
- Implemented DevOps and continuous integration/delivery to production
- Reached balance between quality & speed by improving recruiting, management & coaching of development team
- Achieved Lean product development by relying on Kanban methodology
Tech Lead — Nebula — Nebula / usenebula.com
- Full-stack development using Elixir/Phoenix for Backend and Ember.js for Frontend
- Domain-driven Design architecture using Bounded Contexts
- DevOps infrastructure using Docker containers on AWS: Elastic Beanstalk
Panax — panax.io
Low-code tool for building business applications.
Full Stack Developer
: Launched an MVP of No-Code tool for internal business applications by defining a Client-server architecture using: Node.js / Express SQL Server Angular.jsOperIT — servicesinit.com
IT nearshoring consultancy services for U.S. companies
Software Consultant
: Define and execute ETL, Analytics and Business Intelligence processes and maintenance of existing softwareSAP — sap.com
World's largest company of ERP software
Software Engineering Intern
: Test-driven development for Supportability & SaaS enterprise product lines using JavaScript and JasmineCotizaHoy — cotizahoy.com
B2B startup for car manufacturing industry
Technical Co-Founder
: Launched SaaS/Marketplace developed in Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL HerokuNIC Mexico — nicmexico.mx
NIC organization for .mx top-level domains
Software Development Intern
: Developed internal and customer apps in PHP Java and PL/SQLSkills
Leadership (8y) — Hands-on technical leader and generalist: building teams, shipping products, and scaling delivery. Comfortable wearing multiple hats — from strategy & hiring to architecture & building: Technical Leadership: Project scope & sequencing, Delivery management, Ownership & Accountability, System Design Architecture, Code reviews, Mentoring & Coaching, Agile Methodologies, Roadmaps Planning; Strategic Planning: Tooling & AI enablement, Vendor & cost management, Buy vs Build decisions, Team composition & org design, Architecture & design reviews, RFC/RFD technical documentation, Product + Engineering leadership alignment, Resource allocation; People Management: Mentorship, Coaching, Performance reviews, Performance management, Conflict resolution; Recruitment: Talent sourcing, Hiring manager, Interviewing, Technical screening scripts/challenges, Interviewer coaching, Recruitment process;
Product (8y) — Product-minded engineering leadership: balancing UX, technical constraints, and business outcomes.: Roadmap planning; Resource allocation; Design reviews; UI/UX assessment; Problem solving with business focus; Project management;
Backend (14y) — Backend development is my primary area of expertise, and I have created multiple applications, APIs, and integrations.: Ruby on Rails: Rails 7, Sidekiq, TDD, RSpec, Capybara; Developing APIs: REST API, GraphQL; Serverless on AWS: Python on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Amplify, Cognito; Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, NoSQL; API integrations: REST, GraphQL; Other: Node.js, Python, Kafka, Rust, Elixir, Shell, Search engines - ElasticSearch, Solr, Git;
Frontend (6y) — I have been working with React since 2018. Created multiple applications and websites.: React: React Testing Library, Playwright, Storybook, Redux, Tailwind CSS, React Query; Typescript; Javascript: Node.js, Jest; Next.js: NextAuth, Vercel; Other: Hotwire & Stimulus, React Native, TailwindCSS;
DevOps (5y) — Building and evolving infrastructure from scratch: CI/CD, cloud environments, reliability, and developer workflows.: AWS: EKS, S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, Cloudflare; Docker; Kubernetes: GitOPS - ArgoCD, Kustomize, Helm; Other: Greenfield infrastructure setup, Terraform, CI/CD, CDN, Observability, Distributed systems, Fly.io;
AI (1y) — Hands-on with AI-assisted engineering and AI product delivery: agent workflows, team adoption, and production-oriented experimentation.: AI tools: Cursor / CLI, Claude / Code CLI, OpenCode, OpenAI / API, Gemini, CodeRabbit; Multi-agent orchestration: AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / .cursor/rules, Git worktrees, MCP / ACP, Agent Skills, Parallel agents, QMD workflows; Workflows: Plan-first for complex tasks, Parallel exploration and execution, Verification-first loops (tests, checks, review), Learn from mistakes via docs/rules updates, Automating repeatable workflows (skills/commands); AI product features: Chatbots, RAGs (Pinecone, pgvector), Context tuning & prompt refinement, Security and privacy guardrails;
Education
Hochschule Offenburg
🗓 Oct 2012 - Feb 2014
University of Applied Sciences Offenburg
ITESM Monterrey
🗓 Aug 2005 - Dec 2009
Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education