Hector Castro's CV

• Email: [email protected]
• Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Website: hector.dev
• LinkedIn: hectcastro
• GitHub: hectcastro

Summary

Technical leader with over a decade of experience designing, building, and scaling resilient cloud-native systems. Proven expertise bridging technical execution with strategic business outcomes, with demonstrated success in both individual contributor and engineering leadership roles. Proficient in AWS, infrastructure-as-code, and observability, with a track record of team building, process transformation, and driving engineering efficiency. Seeking remote opportunities in senior individual contributor or leadership positions.

Skills

• Languages: Python, Go, Ruby, TypeScript, Bash
• Frameworks: Django, Express, Rails
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, AWS SAM
• CI/CD & Automation: GitHub Actions, Concourse CI, Packer, Docker
• Security: Snyk, Dependabot
• Cloud Platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS) - API Gateway, Batch, ECS, ElastiCache, IAM, Kinesis, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, VPC
• Databases & Caching: PostgreSQL, Memcached, MySQL, Redis, Riak

Experience

NBCUniversal, Principal Engineer

• Nov 2021 – present
• Remote
• Reduced Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) by an estimated 40% by integrating Datadog to unify logs, metrics, and distributed tracing. This enabled the resolution of critical performance bottlenecks, including Lambda cold starts, database connection management issues, and VPC misconfigurations.
• Secured a 20% dedicated capacity for technical debt reduction, enabling critical framework and language upgrades, including migrating from EOL Angular versions to modern, supported releases and upgrading from Python 3.8 to 3.13. This initiative also allowed for the removal of significant amounts of stale, feature-flagged code, improving overall codebase health and maintainability.
• Established and rolled out a new architectural decision-making framework across a 12-person engineering team (two squads). This initiative clarified technical direction and streamlined collaboration, directly accelerating the delivery of several complex data migration projects.
• Partnered with the Cybersecurity team to pilot and adopt Snyk, making our team the first in the organization to achieve 100% Snyk coverage across all repositories. This proactive collaboration streamlined security reviews and strengthened the company's overall security posture.

Opentrons Labworks, Inc., Senior Site Reliability Engineer

• Apr 2021 – Oct 2021
• Remote
• Scaled critical COVID-19 testing infrastructure during the pandemic from a single site to a bi-coastal (East/West) architecture, doubling automated PCR test processing capacity by adding software support for an entire additional lab.
• Developed container-based tooling to fully automate database schema migrations, reducing database schema change errors to near-zero. This tool orchestrated applying changes to ensure identical migrations were applied across all environments from local development to bi-coastal production instances.
• Built a serverless data pipeline using AWS Lambda to aggregate thousands of daily operational events into a unified data lake. This initiative provided the analytics team with first-time access to testing throughput data, enabling data-driven lab staffing decisions and optimizing operational efficiency.

Azavea, Inc., Vice President of Engineering

• Jan 2017 – Jan 2021
• Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Implemented an architectural decision-making framework using Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) across a 40-person engineering organization. This process was instrumental in navigating complex technology choices and became a foundational process I later adapted at NBCUniversal.
• Transformed the engineering hiring process by introducing a structured apprenticeship program, standardized technical assessments, and improved interview practices, significantly enhancing hiring quality and consistency. The apprenticeship program successfully converted over 66% of participants into full-time engineers, while the overall structured approach reduced time-to-hire and improved candidate-role alignment.
• Managed engineering talent across multiple teams through recruiting, performance evaluations, and mentoring, strengthening overall team capabilities and developing deep expertise in engineering leadership practices that informed my approach to building high-performing teams.
• Launched and facilitated cross-functional working groups to address key business and cultural initiatives. The DEI group's analysis directly led to a full recalibration of company salary bands to ensure equity, while the business development group helped focus the company's strategy on high-potential market areas.
• Implemented a clear and structured engineering career ladder, providing engineers with transparent growth pathways and significantly improving talent retention and organizational clarity.

Azavea, Inc., Senior DevOps Engineer

• July 2014 – Jan 2017
• Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Founded and led the company's first infrastructure team, growing it to four engineers and enabling the engineering organization to scale from 20 to 50 people. This leadership experience and team-building success directly prepared me for the VP of Engineering role. The team led the transition from manual, ad-hoc CloudFormation deployments to a fully automated CI/CD pipeline, dramatically improving deployment reliability and velocity.
• Engineered a reproducible software delivery pipeline used by over 5 teams across 10+ projects, leveraging Terraform and Docker. This new system reduced deployment lead time from hours to minutes and dramatically increased the success rate of production deployments.
• Authored and maintained popular open-source infrastructure modules, including Ansible roles for Papertrail and Spark and a Terraform module for AWS Certificate Manager. These projects, with over 50 stars each on GitHub, established the company as a leader in the local tech community and served as a key tool for talent attraction.
• Replaced ad-hoc incident handling with a structured, blameless post-mortem process adopted by over 5 engineering teams, reducing incidents by approximately 50%. By implementing a standardized template inspired by Google SRE practices, this initiative shifted the culture from blame to learning and systematically captured lessons to prevent repeat outages.

Basho Technologies, Developer Advocate

• Jan 2013 – July 2014
• Remote
• Led technical pre-sales engagements with Fortune 500 and startup organizations nationwide, contributing to an estimated 20% improvement in sales efficiency. Deep technical expertise enabled direct communication with engineers, accelerating customer adoption through technical presentations, proof-of-concepts, and interactive Q&A.
• Maintained and enhanced two official Chef cookbooks for Riak and Riak CS, which became widely adopted by the community and customers. These cookbooks significantly streamlined the complex setup of a distributed database across multiple nodes, eliminating the need for customers to develop deployment solutions from scratch.
• Developed critical tooling and integrations (Docker, Vagrant, Datomic, Omnibus) to simplify Riak product adoption. The Docker setup, a lightweight alternative to traditional VM-based approaches, garnered significant attention and was instrumental in accelerating demos and meeting customers where they were with familiar tooling. Amplified this work through technical blog posts, conference presentations, and meetup talks, significantly boosting community engagement.

Education

Temple University, B.S. in Computer Science

• Sept 2003 – May 2007
• Philadelphia, PA, USA