Software Engineering Leader

RODRIGO LÓPEZ-GUZMÁN

CALGARY, AB @ *******@*****.*** 403-***-****

Engeering Manager and Technical Leader with 30 years of experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams. Led teams of up to 29 engineers across distributed locations (US, Latin America, India) for Fortune 500 clients including United Airlines, MoneyGram, and Synopsys. Co-founded Pragma, now a 1,500+ employee consultancy, serving as President of the Board of Directors during growth from startup to 120 employees. Proven track record of developing engineers through mentorship and structured career growth, with multiple direct reports promoted to Senior and Staff levels. Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and modern software architecture, enabling effective translation of business strategy into scalable technical roadmaps. Operates effectively at all levels: coaching individual contributors on technical growth, managing cross-functional delivery with product and business stakeholders, and presenting architectural decisions to C-suite executives. Fluent in English and Spanish. Open to relocation across North America; Canadian, TN visa eligible.

Leadership & Management Expertise

People Leadership

Team Building & Hiring, Career Development & Mentoring, Performance Management, Coaching & 1-on-1s, Remote & Distributed Teams

Delivery & Process

Agile Development, Scrum, Project & Program Management, Cross-functional Coordination, Risk Management, Release Planning

& Execution

Technical Strategy

Architecture & System Design, Technology Roadmap Planning, Technical Debt Management, Stakeholder Communication, Business-Tech Translation

Technical Foundation

Java, Spring Ecosystem, TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Cloud Architecture, Distributed Systems, Infrastructure as Code AI & Data

LLM Integration (Claude, GPT), MCP Server Development, Machine Learning Operations, Data Pipeline Architecture, SQL & NoSQL Databases

Languages

English, Spanish

Leadership Experience

Numen Technologies Inc. – Calgary, AB Nov. 2024 – Present Founder and Engineering Director

• Founded and leading NUMEN Technologies, a software firm that helps growth-stage engineering organizations become structurally capable of leveraging AI at scale: defining service offerings, go-to-market positioning, and the delivery methodology that governs all client engagements.

• Architecting and building a cloud-native Property Management System as a NUMEN product for small hospitality operators, establishing all foundational engineering decisions: modular monolith over microservices to match team scale, PostgreSQL with Row-Level Security for multi-tenant data isolation, and a white-label partner model enabling channel distribution without per-partner engineering effort.

• Making foundational build-vs-buy decisions across the technology ecosystem: self-hosted infrastructure on Oracle Cloud to eliminate burn during pre-revenue phase, Kotlin + Spring Boot 4 as the primary stack, and jOOQ over JPA for type- safe SQL at scale.

• Defining engineering culture, hiring standards, and development workflows for a platform spanning 33 planned domain areas including reservations, revenue management, point of sale, channel distribution, and AI-powered operation and guest communication with RAG and MCP.

Topstep, Chicago, IL (Remotely from Calgary, AB) Jul. 2022 – Oct. 2025 Lead, Software Engineering

• Led technical strategy and hands-on architecture for company-wide initiatives, including One Step Combine which tripled Topstep’s client base in 6 weeks without platform degradation through careful capacity planning and performance optimization.

• Established Infrastructure as Code practices across Engineering, migrating existing infrastructure to Terraform and training teams on IaC workflows, improving deployment consistency and reducing infrastructure drift.

• Built an MCP server enabling natural language queries against backend systems, reducing diagnostic workflows from 5+ minutes to under 1 minute for support and product teams, demonstrating practical LLM integration.

• Reduced alert noise by 85% in first month through systematic root cause analysis, improving on-call experience and allowing engineering to focus on feature delivery rather than false alarms. Clio, Calgary, AB Mar. 2021 – Oct. 2021

Development Manager

• Rebuilt a five-engineer team during organizational transition through strategic hiring and team structure design, with four of five hires remaining with the company for 2.5+ years, demonstrating strong hiring judgment and onboarding effectiveness.

• Led architectural planning for product unification using AWS-managed Kafka, coordinating technical decisions across multiple teams and stakeholders.

• Contributed to department-wide hiring as interviewer and rotating hiring-decision maker, helping scale the broader engineering organization while maintaining quality bar. Synopsys, Calgary, AB Oct. 2017 – Mar. 2021

Software Engineering Manager II

• Managed 10-engineer team owning Coverity Connect, the web platform for Synopsys’ flagship static analysis product used by 9 of the top 10 software companies and 7 of the top 10 aerospace/defense firms.

• Built a culture of technical excellence and career growth, leading four engineers to promotion: two to Senior, one to Senior II, and one to Staff Engineer through structured mentorship, clear growth plans, and advocacy.

• Reduced customer escalations from 7-9 per quarter to 0-1 over final 9 months through improved release quality, cross- team coordination with QA and Support, and proactive issue identification.

• Drove architecture modernization from monolith to container-deployable components, enabling horizontal scaling and modern deployment practices while maintaining product stability.

• Decreased feature-drop rate from 2-3 per release to near-zero through strengthened release planning, improved estimation processes, and better alignment between team capacity and commitments. Globant – Multiple locations across USA Jan. 2011 – Jul. 2017 Architect / Technical Director (select engagements) Delivered technical leadership across six Fortune 500 enterprise clients over 6.5 years. Served as on-site client lead on four engagements, managing delivery teams distributed across US, Latin America, and India, including coordination with external vendors.

• United Airlines — Led 10-engineer team architecting crew management re-engineering for 34,000+ pilots and flight attendants operating 1.6M annual flights. Coordinated multi-vendor delivery across US and India, managing technical integration of Couchbase, microservices, TIBCO, and legacy Continental systems.

• MoneyGram International — Managed 29-engineer team as Java/Web Architect, the largest team leadership role in career. Enabled business expansion to two new countries and major branded partnership with Walmart through technical platform capabilities.

• Sears Holdings — Rescued and relaunched Shop Your Way Health in six weeks, coordinating 18 engineers across three companies spanning US, Latin America, and India under tight deadline pressure.

• Stanley Black & Decker — Delivered ToolConnect, an IoT platform for DeWalt and Stanley smart tools using AWS Lambda, Node.js, and React/Angular.

• Southwest Airlines — Architectural engagement for aviation maintenance systems integration.

• Wells Fargo — Architectural engagement for standardization of internal .NET applications. Earlier Career 1994 – 2011

Pragma – Medellín, Colombia 1996 – 2005, 2006 – 2008 Co-Founder

• Co-founded software consultancy now employing 1,500+ people. Served as President of Board of Directors (2002- 2004) when company reached 120 employees and $2M revenue, managing business strategy, financial planning, and organizational growth during critical scaling phase. Early leadership experience establishing hiring practices, technical standards, and company culture that enabled long-term growth. Ibiika – Medellín, Colombia 2005 – 2007

Co-Founder & Data Mining Head

• Co-founded predictive analytics consultancy, building data science practice and delivering clustering and prediction models for enterprise clients in finance (Banco Santander), manufacturing (Cemex), and retail (Grupo Éxito). Additional Leadership Experience Aug. 1994 – Jan. 2011 Multiple Positions

• Project Manager at Informatix Inc. — Built and managed 12-person offshore development team (2010-2011).

• Technology Coordinator, Colombian Ministry of ICT — Led nationwide digital inclusion infrastructure initiative (2009- 2010).

• Postgraduate Professor, Universidad EAFIT — Taught web development and internet architecture in master’s programs

(2004-2007).

Education

Universidad EAFIT, Medellín, Colombia Jul. 1990 – Dec. 1995 Systems Engineering / Computer Science

Coursera – deeplearning.ai 2019 – 2021

Deep Learning Specialization (5-course series)

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