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EXPERIENCE
Google - The Nature Conservancy Brazil – Software Engineer
April 2023 - Current
London - UK
Current
- Working with The Nature Conservancy Brazil to create a tool to identify illegally harvested wood from the Amazon rainforest, using AI to combat deforestation.
Google – Software Engineer
March 2019 - Current
London - UK
Current
- Working on the Google Play Developer Console, enabling millions of Android developers worldwide to publish apps to >3 billion devices and grow their business with Google Play.
- Designed and developed a pipeline to parse deep links in apps uploaded to Play Console, to flag misconfigured deep links. This resulted in 157 apps fixing 1.5M misconfigured URLs so far, delivering $15.4M in ARR in the 2.5 months since launch, projected to generate $70M in 2023, through 2x improved ad and app-purchase conversion rates in-app rather than in-browser.
- Led the rewrite of the UI components library (used by >200 London-based engineers every week) to support responsive design principles, leading to an increase in mobile user share of the Play Console from 12% to 22%.
- Rewrote Play Console’s email engine, successfully automating away the effort required to send email notifications (reduced a 8-step process taking several days of engineering effort to just 1 line of configuration per message category).
- Owner of Play Console's messaging infrastructure, used by >200 engineers every week.
- Served as manager to two Engineering interns working on the Google Play Console, who both performed above expectations and have received and accepted offers to return to Google in London.
- Volunteering to provide and enhance opportunities at Google for engineers from under-represented groups in technology. This has included serving as a 1:1 coach and mentor to several engineering interns, creating “Spotlight on London” videos encouraging students in EMEA to choose London as the best place for a technology career at Google, and volunteering at trainings and events.
Google – Software Engineering Intern
Feb 2017 - Jun 2017 & May to Aug 2018
London, UK (2018) – Seattle, USA (2017)
- Developed a pipeline to automate on-demand ingestion of billions of datapoints of Play Console data into BigQuery (Google’s enterprise data warehouse).
- Infrastructure I built for this intern project is still operating mostly unchanged nearly 5 years later, still generating significant value for Google Cloud customers and revenue for Google.
EDUCATION
Universidad de los Andes | Bogotá, Colombia
2014 – Dec 2018
Ranked #5 top university in Latin America, #1 in Colombia by
QS World University Rankings
Bachelor of Science, Systems and Computing Engineering
GPA: 4.24 / 5
Mozilla Open Leaders | Remote
2019
Invited by Mozilla to participate as web developer of
Citapress.org
Part of the 7th Round of Mozilla Open Leaders, a program by Mozilla to
fuel the Internet Health movement, designing and building open source
projects that empower collaboration within inclusive communities.
AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS
UK Exceptional Talent Visa Holder
UK Home Office – Endorsed in the field 'Digital Technology' 2023
UK Home Office – Endorsed in the field 'Digital Technology' 2023
Apple WWDC Scholarship winner
WWDC 2018 Conference in California - Apple Inc. 2018
WWDC 2018 Conference in California - Apple Inc. 2018
Twice Linux Foundation Scholarship winner
Open Networking Summit & Open Source Summit Europe 2018
Open Networking Summit & Open Source Summit Europe 2018
Highest national score in standardized college admission test ICFES
Colombian Ministry of Education 2014
Colombian Ministry of Education 2014
Full-tuition Scholarship winner
Bachilleres por Colombia Program, Ecopetrol S.A. 2014
Bachilleres por Colombia Program, Ecopetrol S.A. 2014
Highest undergraduate admission score
Alberto Magno Award, Universidad de los Andes 2014
Alberto Magno Award, Universidad de los Andes 2014
SELECTED PROJECTS
Cita - Online press website (2018 - Current)
citapress.org
- Web development lead (volunteer) for citapress.org, an open source, independent press and online library publishing public-domain books written by women, in an interactive online reader and in print.
- Citapress has received praise and coverage in several press outlets (like Adobe XD blog, Typewolf, Aiga’s Eye on Design, among others) and has been featured at multiple international conferences (Write/Speak/Code San Francisco, OpenCon NYC, Libre Graphics Meeting in Madrid).
- The organisation received a $245,000 Grant from Educopia Institute to build organisational capacity and business planning, and a Latin American Design Award for Web Development.
- Since the start of the grant (2021), my role has focused on leading future technology stack decisions, advising on tech hiring and open source community management.
NYC Harbor Water Quality – Web app (2018)
nycwater.castrovaron.com
- Developed and deployed a web interface for exploring NYC water quality metrics using IDW interpolations.
- Built using the Google Maps API, showing over >10K samples of water quality data over a span of 100 years on an interactive online map of the NYC Harbor.
Periplo Journal – iOS App (2017)
periplo.castrovaron.com
- Designed, developed and published a native iOS journaling app, with a simple, easy-to-use interface and Markdown support for writing and previewing. Built using Swift and native iOS frameworks.
Become a curator – Random art statement generator (2016)
bac.castrovaron.com
- Developed and deployed a web app (front-end and back-end) for a random art statement generator, using Markov chains to generate clear but meaningless sentences based on large bodies of text.
- Built using the Flask / Python for the backend, and Angular.js for the front-end. Deployed on Heroku.
- Achieved > 10K page views and statements generated in the first month.