Ben Orozco
Hands-on senior engineer and tech lead with 15+ years building and operating web applications across U.S. and LatAm startups. Strongest on the backend — [Ruby on Rails](#ruby-on-rails), [PostgreSQL](#databases), APIs, [Sidekiq](#ruby-on-rails) background processing, and production reliability — with enough [React](#react)/[TypeScript](#typescript) range to ship full-stack product features end to end. I have led teams and complex workstreams from design through production while staying close to architecture, code reviews, and mentoring. Relevant depth in search and retrieval ([Solr](#backend-other), [OpenSearch](#backend-other)), content and translation pipelines, integrations, and practical [AI-assisted product](#ai) and engineering workflows. Looking for a role where technical leadership still means writing code and raising the bar for a team.
Experience
Trivelta — trivelta.com/
B2B iGaming technology provider. Promoted to lead three Backoffice teams while remaining a fractional PAM Tech Lead and developer on high-leverage platform and AI initiatives.
Engineering Manager, Backoffice
- Lead a 10-person Backoffice engineering group, with five direct reports (two Tech Leads and three Engineers) and five additional Engineers managed through the team leads.
- Own cross-team priorities, roadmap execution, delivery, and technical alignment across PAM, TCM, and Data Engineering.
- Remain hands-on as fractional PAM Tech Lead and developer for high-leverage work involving ClickHouse, a secure MCP connector, and migration to Amazon EKS.
- Shape the product and technical direction for a greenfield, AI-enabled support product tailored to iGaming operators; development has not yet started.
Lead Software Engineer (Platform Team Lead)
- Architecting and building the admin backend in FastAPI/Python with DDD bounded contexts and typed Pydantic contracts, deployed on AWS serverless (Lambda, DynamoDB, Athena, OpenSearch, Cognito, EventBridge) with a React admin UI.
- Shipping the backoffice in vertical slices, including reporting with parallel cross-store analytics enrichment and tenant-aware currency translation, replacing Tableau views with in-product dashboards operators use daily.
- Owning delivery across a legacy platform and its greenfield replacement at the same time — keeping production healthy while migrating behind feature flags.
- Raising engineering quality through design reviews, RFD/PRD planning, code reviews, testing, CI/CD, and trunk-based development.
- Partnering with product and engineering leadership to translate goals into milestones, ownership, and tradeoffs, and standardizing practical AI workflows across the team.
Apptegy — apptegy.com
EdTech SaaS serving 6,000+ school districts and 10MM+ users. Strongest Rails/full-stack evidence at scale: APIs, Sidekiq background jobs, content/translation services, integrations, and hands-on technical leadership during rapid growth.
VP of Engineering
- Led AI enablement across engineering, driving practical adoption of Cursor, Claude, CodeRabbit, and Gemini, improving productivity by 10% and cutting code review time by 60%.
- Sponsored architecture simplification and cost reduction across a gRPC microservices landscape, pushing clearer domain boundaries and delivery ergonomics.
- Coached engineers and managers, ran interview loops, and helped the organization grow while keeping quality and cadence on products used by millions of end users.
Lead Software Engineer
- Built platform services and APIs in Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL for web and mobile clients, with Sidekiq handling hundreds of thousands of background jobs a day.
- Led greenfield outpost services: an OAuth2/OpenID Connect identity provider for SSO across the product suite; a multi-channel notification relay (SMS, voice/TTS, push, email) that scaled from tens to thousands of messages per minute; plus forms/surveys, ETL, translation, LMS, and real-time chat.
- Owned reliability and release practices across AWS, Kubernetes, and CI/CD, and raised the bar through architecture reviews, peer review, and unit testing.
- Worked as scrum master with Product, interviewed full-stack candidates, and onboarded engineers while staying in the codebase.
Ecaresoft — ecaresoft.com
EHR and hospital systems for clinics and hospitals in Latin America and the Middle East. Direct evidence of Rails backends, Sidekiq, full-text search on Solr, ML/Python services, Elixir, and content-adjacent product work.
CTO — Nimbo — Nimbo / nimbo-x.com
- Built fault-tolerant APIs and services in Ruby, Java, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq, with an Ember.js frontend.
- Delivered specialized backends: full-text search on Apache Solr, a drug-interactions service on Wolters Kluwer Medi-Span®, and a prediction/classification service in Python and Tensorflow.
- Established coding, review, and testing practices, and balanced quality with speed while recruiting and coaching the team.
Tech Lead — Nebula — Nebula / usenebula.com
- Built the product in Elixir/Phoenix on the backend and Ember.js on the frontend, with Docker on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
- Applied Domain-Driven Design with bounded contexts to keep a complex domain shippable.
CTO
- Launched internationalization for new markets through APIs, microservices, and serverless functions.
- Improved availability and resilience with containerization, elastic infrastructure, automated testing, and CI/CD.
HealthTree — healthtree.org
Healthcare platform for cancer patients and caregivers. Small-team CTO role with daily Rails and React coding, observability, and lean delivery.
CTO
- Hands-on across backend APIs in Ruby on Rails, React.js clients, and data pipelines, including code review and testing.
- Built the feedback loop between product and patients using Metabase, Sentry, and Intercom.
- Automated the product lifecycle through DevOps and CI/CD, and stood up a lean Kanban delivery process from scratch.
Brokerlit — brokerlit.com
Real estate SaaS (MLS, CMS, CRM). Side venture shipping the whole Rails + React/TypeScript stack with a very small team.
Technical Co-Founder
- Built the platform hands-on in Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, React.js, and Next.js.
- Ran infrastructure on Fly.io and Vercel, keeping operations cheap and the iteration loop short.
BaseQL — baseql.com
GraphQL access point for cloud data (Airtable & Google Sheets), built as a bootstrapped side project. 🎯 Acquired in 2024
Founder
Panax — panax.io
Low-code tool for building business applications.
Full Stack Developer
: Launched an MVP for a no-code internal-applications platform using Node.js, Express, SQL Server, and AngularJS.OperIT — servicesinit.com
IT nearshoring consultancy services for U.S. companies
Software Consultant
: Designed ETL, analytics, and business-intelligence workflows and maintained existing software.SAP — sap.com
World's largest company of ERP software
Software Engineering Intern
: Practiced test-driven development for enterprise SaaS product lines using JavaScript and Jasmine.CotizaHoy — cotizahoy.com
B2B startup for car manufacturing industry
Technical Co-Founder
: Launched a B2B SaaS marketplace built with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and Heroku.NIC Mexico — nicmexico.mx
NIC organization for .mx top-level domains
Software Development Intern
: Developed internal and customer applications using PHP, Java, and PL/SQL.Skills
Backend (17y) — Primary depth: [Ruby on Rails](#ruby-on-rails) applications, [PostgreSQL](#databases) schema design and query optimization, REST/GraphQL APIs, [Sidekiq](#ruby-on-rails) background processing, search ([Solr](#backend-other), [OpenSearch](#backend-other)), and comparable server-side work in [Python](#backend-other) and [Elixir](#backend-other).: 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 (9y) — Modern frontend range across [React](#react), [TypeScript](#typescript), and [Next.js](#next.js) — enough to ship full-stack product features and review UI work with judgment.: React: React Testing Library, Playwright, Storybook, Redux, Tailwind CSS, React Query; TypeScript; JavaScript: Node.js, Jest; Next.js: NextAuth, Vercel; Other: Hotwire and Stimulus, React Native, TailwindCSS;
Leadership (11y) — Hands-on technical leadership: planning and estimation, architecture ownership, design and code reviews, mentoring, and helping other engineers succeed — without needing a pure people-management seat.: Technical Leadership: Project scope and sequencing, Delivery management, Ownership and accountability, System design and architecture, Code reviews, Mentoring and coaching, Agile methodologies, Roadmap planning; Strategic Planning: Tooling and AI enablement, Vendor and cost management, Build-versus-buy decisions, Team composition and organization design, Architecture and design reviews, RFC/RFD technical documentation, Product and Engineering 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;
AI (4y) — Production-minded AI work: team enablement for [AI tools](#ai-tools), agentic [workflows](#ai-workflows), and shipped AI product features including chatbots, RAG, and evaluation-oriented iteration.: 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 and prompt refinement, Security and privacy guardrails;
DevOps (8y) — Operating what I ship: [AWS](#aws), [Docker](#docker), [Kubernetes](#kubernetes), CI/CD, observability, and production troubleshooting for distributed systems.: AWS: EKS, S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda; Docker; Kubernetes: GitOPS - ArgoCD, Kustomize, Helm; Other: Greenfield infrastructure setup, Terraform, CI/CD, CDN, Observability, Distributed systems, Cloudflare, Fly.io;
Product (11y) — Translating product goals into technical plans, milestones, and ownership; partnering with Product, QA, and DevOps on tradeoffs and delivery risk.: Roadmap planning; Resource allocation; Design reviews; UI/UX assessment; Problem solving with business focus; Project management;
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