Eduardo Ferro Aldama
Address: Madrid / Spain |
Experience
Head of Engineering and Data Platform (Sep 2024-Now)
Clarity.ai
fully remote / >30% Hands On.
Expanded previous Platform responsibilities to lead the Data Platform area, overseeing 6 teams with a total of 35 engineering professionals.
- Strategic Transformation & Lean Leadership: Led Data Platform reconstruction using Lean principles, shifting focus from technology to product/customer. Addressed systemic complexity through proactive simplification.
- Efficiency & Operational Optimization: Drastically reduced firefighting and accelerated innovation, optimizing operational/tool costs and increasing engineering efficiency, eliminating the need for backfill.
- Data Product-Oriented Architecture: Defined a data product-based architecture to replace a centralized system, establishing clear boundaries, ownership, and a self-service vision.
- Delivery Acceleration & DevEx: Redefined incentives and priorities, promoting simplification, DevEx, collaboration, and sustainable quality (XP & testing). Shifted value from individual heroism to impact and waste elimination.
- Complex Feature Delivery: Demonstrated feasibility of "impossible" features (e.g., real-time data correction with full traceability) by migrating from slow pipelines to a dedicated PostgreSQL application, dramatically reducing hotfix delivery cycles.
- Modern Software Engineering Practices: Introduced/adapted TDD, Simple Design, Trunk Based Development, and Continuous Integration. Focused on data quality with schema validation, business rules, and statistical tests using tools like Soda.
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, AWS, Terraform, Python, Airflow, Snowflake, dbt, AI Assisted code, ArgoCD, Argo Workflows, Postgres.
Platform Engineering Manager (Apr 2020-Sep 2024)
Clarity.ai
fully remote / >15% Hands On.
As the Platform Area Lead, I have had the unique opportunity to not only oversee the Platform/SRE, Developer Experience, Platform App Framework, and Corporate IT & Cybersecurity teams but also to create and grow most of these functions from scratch. Through my leadership and strategic vision, we have been able to sustainably grow the team at a rate of almost double each year while implementing continuous improvement processes. As a member of the technology leadership team, I have been proactive in driving improvements to our software delivery and operational performance (team topologies concepts, Continuous Delivery, Cloud native architecture, etc.).
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, AWS (EC2, EKS k8s, Aurora RDS), Kafka, Redis, Python, RoR, Go, Immutable infrastructure, Infrastructure as code (terraform), Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana.
VP Platform Engineering (Aug 2019 - Mar 2020)
Nextail Labs
fully remote / >30% Hands On.
As responsible for the platform department, I was in charge of leading all cross-cutting efforts aimed at:
- Improving the development experience of the product/engineering team.
- Enable functional squads to efficiently develop their work (using a self-service platform).
- Establish the technological and architectural bases of our platform (app framework, monitoring, scheduling, observability, domain events).
- Generate the necessary tools for the nextail operations and services team (including operational dashboards, operational DBs, and automation of operational tasks).
Additionally, I acted as an Engineering Manager for the team (6 Engineers) (1on1s, motivation, mentoring, performance reviews) and as Product Manager for some of the initiatives.
This team effort has enabled us:
- Allow nextail to professionalize Operations and On-Call support.
- Improve overall system performance and resource utilization.
- Reduce cloud costs (by more than 25%).
- Reduce the toil in the engineering department dramatically.
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, AWS (EC2, EKS k8s, Aurora RDS), Kafka, Redis, Python, RoR, Go, Immutable infrastructure, Infrastructure as code (terraform), Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana.
VP Engineering (Feb 2018 - Aug 2019)
Nextail Labs
fully remote / >10% HandsOn.
As responsible for the engineering team, I was in charge of doubling the size of the team and grow from a group of very talented engineers to a product delivery organization with shared practices and values and organize in squads aligned with the fast scalability need of the business.
This goal required:
- Hire and onboard 13 engineers
- Introduce better testing and development practices with Continuous Delivery as our goal.
- Help with the creation of the Product team and with the definition/introduction of the Product delivery processes.
- Improve the resiliency and stability of the platform (Incident management process, infrastructure as code, k8s migration, improved observability, and monitoring)
- Act as a technical reference regarding cloud-native designs, scalability, splitting the monolith, and so on.
- Act as an Engineering Manager for the team (+20 engineers) (1on1s, motivation, mentoring, performance reviews).
This team effort has enabled us:
- Changing our strategy toward whales (clients x10 in size).
- Deliver new features and modules (each squad autonomously).
- Improve our stability and introduce enterprise-grade SLAs.
- Reduce the number of production incidents drastically.
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, AWS (EC2, EKS k8s, Aurora RDS), Redis, Python, RoR, Go, Immutable infrastructure, Infrastructure as code (terraform), Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana.
Lead Developer / Head of Tech (Nov 2015 - Feb 2018)
TheMotion
Partially remote / >40% Hands on.
Software development as a Senior Tech Lead for a cloud-native video ad creation platform.
As responsible for the architecture of the platform, I helped to create an evolutionary architecture for the product (implemented using ideas from DDD, microservices, reactive systems, cloud-native design).
- Architecture and practices optimized for:
- Elasticity ranging from 40 to more than 2000 machines.
- Continuous delivery, rapid changes, and evolution
- Fault tolerance and high availability
- Autonomous teams and independent deployment
Advocate and change agent for the introduction of XP and modern agile values and practices (TDD, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, collective ownership, emergent and straightforward design, courage, clean code). Working as a practitioner and also mentoring the team.
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, AWS (ECS, ECR, EC2, Kinesis, SQS, S3, Dynamodb... ), Python, Go, Docker, SOLID, hexagonal architecture, Immutable infrastructure, Infrastructure as code (cloud formation, ansible).
Growing a group of very talented engineers to become an agile team with shared practices and values that cares deeply about the product and platform that we are building.
Lead Software Developer / Head of Dev/Product Department 2012-2016 Jan
Alea Soluciones
Software/System development for the telecommunication industry (FTTH/GPON, Docsis/HFC, VoIP, etc) (Provisioning, monitoring, OSS/BSS, etc.)
Extreme Programming practitioner (TDD, Pair programming, Continuous Integration, Simple design (and organic growth), Continuous Delivery, Refactor/ Continuous design improvement, OO, Clean Code, SOLID, Domain Driven Design, Services Architecture.
An advocate of Software Craftsmanship. DevOps practitioner. Retrospective facilitator.
I successfully built and led the development/product team from the ground up, overseeing all aspects of team creation, including hiring, culture development, process selection, and principles establishment. With my guidance and support, the team eventually matured and was able to take on more responsibilities, becoming a highly efficient and self-managed agile product development team.
Tech Stack & Practices: Lean Software Development, CD, XP, Python, Go, Docker, RabbitMQ, Redis, Puppet, Ansible, Docker, PostgresSQL, GNU/Linux, MySQL.
Gnu/Linux Expert - New Products R & D 2007-2012
Alea Soluciones
Creation/modification of Gnu/Linux systems for telecommunication environments (HFC networks, Docsis, QoS, IP Traffic Control, VoIP, SIP, digital TV, Internet Access). Creating a GNU/linux distribution with more than 150 modified/created packages (deb). Install/Rescue system and utilities for our distro and servers. This distro is used by more than 100 customers. Software development for DOCSIS provisioning, a gateway for DVB-C Conditional Access provisioning, Cisco-like cli interpreter, Asterisk patches for PacketCable NCS, Pay per View Digital TV platform, etc. Internal bugfixes and patches for open source apps (iscdhcp, atftp, docsis, asterisk, etc.).
I have started several projects to lower the operating cost of these servers:
- Configuration management solution (evaluation, selection, initial deployment).
- Local and Remote monitoring (evaluation, selection, initial deployment) and integration with our systems (snmp agents, ipmi utilities, nagios and zenoss plugins and commands, etc...). R&D for new products (interactive TV, monitoring, Video on demand, auto-adaptation ip traffic rules,....)
Scrum Team member
Technologies: Python, C, C++, Shell, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Django, couchdb, RabbitMQ, Soap, Corba, GNU/Linux, Puppet, Bacula, Zenoss, Nagios, Asterisk, ISC-DHCP/DNS
Freelance Technology Consultant (2007) Freelance
Technology Consultant for Software Architectures, Gnu/linux Systems, software development, including agile methods support/implantation.
POS Software Architect 2006-2007 DIA SA
Architecture of the Shop software system, including POS functions, back office and interfaces with the Dia Enterprise Systems (foundational layer, i18n l10n, Middleware, persistence, Development Tools, etc).
Technologies: OOA/OOD, Patterns, UML, C++, Python, MySQL, GNU/Linux
Lead developer for Stock Management development team. Use Cases, Object-Oriented Analysis/Design, and team management.
Technologies: OOA/OOD, Patterns, UML, C++, Python, MySQL, GNU/Linux
Senior Developer (Polar SHS 2002-2002)
Senior developer in a team for multimedia services invoicing.
Technologies: OOA/OOD, Patterns, C++, Oracle, Sun Solaris, CVS, Telefónica I+D Framework for Invoicing prepayment.
Software Engineer at SICE (1999-2002)
Senior developer for Free flow / Dynamic tolling systems.
Technologies: OOA/OOD, Patterns, C++, C, Python, Gtk, Motif, Real Time programming, GNU/Linux Kernel Modules, Hardware drivers, HP-UX, GNU/Linux, Lynx RT, Oracle, CVS, Rational Rose, Rational Requisite Pro, Tibco Rendezvous, High Availability Systems, Clustering. Software Architecture design.
System/Network administrator (ISI 1998 - 1999) (PWC project)
Managed the installation and administration of a data center from the ground up, including the implementation of an SAP/R3 system for the Terra Mítica thematic park. Provided technical support for 60-70 users and utilized a range of technologies such as Cisco Systems, HP Systems, HP AutoRAID Disks Arrays, DLT Robot, HP-UX, Oracle, SAP, Lotus Domino, HP-OpenView, Shell Scripting, SQL, and job automation tools. Experienced in working with both Windows NT and Unix operating systems.
University Teacher (Deusto University 1997 - 1998)
University Teacher of practices for all of the courses of the department of programming and computer languages (C, Pascal, C++, Java).
Developer (CEINSA, IT-Deusto Group 1997 - 1997)
Technologies: UNIX (AIX / HP-UX), Oracle, SQL, C, ProC, Shell Script, CVS, Makefiles, Visual C++ Win32 for the frontend.
Education
1997 - 1998 DESI (Internet/Intranet Solutions) Master, Deusto University
1992 - 1997 Computer Science, Deusto University
Other information
Speaker at technical conferences and meetups since 2011, with over 30 talks, workshops, and podcast appearances on software development and engineering leadership.
Main topics:
- Lean Software Development and waste elimination
- AI's impact on software development
- Software Craftsmanship and Extreme Programming
- Technical leadership and engineering team management
Featured talks:
- "Radical Detachment in the AI Era" - Keynote at Barcelona Software Crafters 2025
- "The Complexity Trap" - DevOpsDays Madrid 2023
- "How we improve the developer experience at Clarity AI" - PlatformCon 2022
Mostly in Spanish, some talks in English.
Complete list of talks, workshops, and podcasts: https://eferro.github.io/eferro-talks/