Ben Orozco
Hands-on CTO and VP of Engineering with 15+ years shipping and operating multi-role SaaS platforms — CRM and workflow systems, communications, reporting, identity/RBAC, integrations, and AI-assisted product work. I have led remote engineering orgs up to 140+ people, inherited messy systems, simplified architecture to cut cost and risk, and stayed close enough to the codebase to challenge weak technical decisions. Comfortable owning the full stack of accountability: technical roadmap, engineering standards, CI/CD and launch readiness, vendor and cloud spend, and explaining trade-offs clearly to non-technical leadership. Direct experience in real estate technology through Brokerlit (MLS, CMS, CRM), plus deep operational-software work across EdTech and healthcare platforms with admins, staff, customers, and partner roles.
Experience
Apptegy — apptegy.com
High-growth EdTech SaaS serving 6,000+ school districts and 10MM+ users. Closest evidence of VP-level ownership across architecture, remote engineering leadership, cost control, AI enablement, multi-channel integrations, and multi-role product systems at scale.
VP of Engineering
- Helped hire, form, and lead a remote engineering organization of 140+ engineers across the U.S. and Mexico — coaching managers and ICs, running performance systems, and keeping ownership culture intact through growth.
- Drove architecture simplification and meaningful cost reduction across a gRPC microservices landscape and in-house frameworks, pushing clearer domain boundaries and more sustainable delivery.
- Partnered with product and company leadership on roadmap sequencing, org design, and execution risk — translating technical debt, launch blockers, and trade-offs into plain business terms.
- Led practical AI enablement across engineering (Cursor, Claude, CodeRabbit, Gemini), improving productivity by 10% and cutting code review time by 60% while keeping quality and privacy discipline.
Lead Software Engineer
- Built an AuthN/Z identity provider on OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for SSO and user management across a growing multi-product suite with thousands of new users flowing in continuously.
- Designed and shipped a multi-channel alerting relay (SMS, voice/TTS, push, email, social) with provider adapters, retries, webhooks, and async analytics — scaling from tens to thousands of notifications per minute under crisis load.
- Led platform services for forms/surveys, ETL, translation, LMS, and real-time messaging in Ruby on Rails/PostgreSQL with Sidekiq handling hundreds of thousands of background jobs a day.
- Owned reliability and release practices across AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, and raised the bar through architecture reviews, testing, and mentoring.
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.
Brokerlit — brokerlit.com
Real estate SaaS spanning MLS, CMS, and CRM for brokers — direct property-tech and multi-workflow product ownership. Strongest niche signal for property operations platforms.
Technical Co-Founder
- Built the platform end to end in Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, React.js, and Next.js — listings, CRM/lead capture, and content workflows for brokers.
- Ran lean infrastructure on Fly.io and Vercel, making build-versus-buy and cost decisions with a very small team.
Trivelta — trivelta.com/
B2B platform company. Current hands-on technical lead role proving I still evaluate systems, write critical path code, and raise engineering quality while managing a distributed team.
Lead Software Engineer (Platform Team Lead)
- Architecting and building the admin backend in FastAPI/Python with DDD bounded contexts, deployed on AWS serverless with OpenSearch-backed analytics and a React UI.
- Keeping production healthy on the legacy path while migrating behind feature flags — sequencing debt payoff against business delivery without freezing the roadmap.
- Established design reviews, RFD/PRD planning, code reviews, testing, CI/CD, and trunk-based development; standardized practical AI workflows for the team.
- Helped build and organize the Monterrey engineering team through international hiring, interviewing, coaching, and performance management.
Ecaresoft — ecaresoft.com
EHR and hospital systems for clinics and hospitals across Latin America and the Middle East. Multi-role operational software (physicians, clinic staff, admins) with CTO ownership from MVP through international expansion.
CTO — Nimbo — Nimbo / nimbo-x.com
- Owned end-to-end clinical and practice workflows — scheduling, records, billing — with fault-tolerant APIs in Ruby, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq.
- Shipped supporting services for full-text search (Solr), drug interactions, and ML classification in Python, while establishing coding, review, and testing standards.
- Balanced quality and speed through recruiting, coaching, and lean Kanban delivery in a market with dated incumbent software.
CTO
- Launched internationalization through APIs, microservices, and serverless functions; improved availability with containers, automated testing, and CI/CD.
- Worked directly with Product, Sales, and Support to turn customer feedback into sequenced roadmap decisions, including joining customer conversations first-hand.
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
HealthTree — healthtree.org
Patient-facing healthcare platform. Small-team CTO role combining architecture ownership, engineering standards, and launch/delivery discipline.
CTO
- Built backend APIs in Ruby on Rails and React.js clients, with review, testing, and CI/CD as non-negotiable defaults.
- Stood up Metabase, Sentry, and Intercom so product decisions followed real usage and incidents were visible.
- Recruited and retained engineers in a competitive U.S. market while keeping a small team shipping.
BaseQL — baseql.com
GraphQL access layer for cloud data. Founder-led SaaS through acquisition — ownership of architecture, cost, support, and whether the product was actually ready.
Founder
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 (11y) — CTO / VP-level ownership: technical direction, remote team leadership, engineering standards, roadmap sequencing, budget and vendor judgment, and clear communication of risk to non-technical leadership.: 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;
Backend (17y) — Backend architecture depth: [Ruby on Rails](#ruby-on-rails), [PostgreSQL](#databases), APIs, AuthN/Z and multi-tenant access patterns, background processing, integrations with retries/webhooks, and comparable work in [Python](#backend-other)/[Node.js](#javascript).: 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;
Product (11y) — Operational SaaS product sense: CRM and workflow systems, multi-role portals, notifications, reporting, and translating incomplete workflows into a realistic launch plan.: Roadmap planning; Resource allocation; Design reviews; UI/UX assessment; Problem solving with business focus; Project management;
AI (4y) — AI as an engineering and product concern: team enablement, agentic workflows, RAG/chat features, evaluation and cost control, and privacy-conscious production use — not demos for demos' sake.: 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;
DevOps (8y) — Launch readiness and operations: [AWS](#aws), [Kubernetes](#kubernetes), CI/CD, observability, incident response, and infrastructure choices that stay affordable for the stage of the company.: 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;
Frontend (9y) — Enough [React](#react)/[TypeScript](#typescript) range to review UI architecture, staff dashboards, and portal UX with judgment — not only to delegate them.: 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;
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