Profile
Rails architect with 15+ years of production Rails who designs, builds, ships and operates systems end to end, from regulated healthcare and banking platforms to my own products. I have taken apps from Rails 2.x through every major version to 8.1, run them for years on Redis, Sidekiq, AWS and Heroku, and more recently moved several onto the Solid stack deployed with Kamal.
Co-founded michelada.io and grew it from zero to 80 people, leading 75 engineers across 30+ clients including Levi’s LATAM, Walmart Labs, Atipica, Kueski and Billfloat, through its acquisition by Arkus Nexus in 2020. CTO of Aoorora, an API-first core banking platform for Mexican FinTech. Architect of a HIPAA and SOC 2 clinical data platform serving 60+ clinics. Today I lead Maquina, open-source Rails and AI tooling, and I act as the product owner and designer of every project listed here.
Before Rails I spent a decade in enterprise systems: COBOL and JCL on the mainframe at Panasonic, an Oracle ERP migration, and SQL Server data warehousing. Industries: fintech and core banking, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, agriculture, developer tooling and education.
Experience
Maquina · Founder & Principal Architect
Independent Rails architecture and AI tooling
- Build and maintain open-source Rails tooling used by teams running Claude Code and Cursor: Rails MCP Server, Recuerd0, Maquina Generators and Maquina Components.
- Contract architecture engagements for US and Mexican companies: system design, brownfield assessment and AI integration.
Confidential US healthcare group · Rails Architect, Clinical Data Platform
Contract · multi-site med spa group and corporate practice · seed to Series A
- Designed the architecture and data pipeline from scratch (schema, domain modeling, real-time communication data) and delivered it to production across 60+ clinic locations.
- Built bidirectional integrations with 10 external EHR systems, keeping clinic and corporate records consistent across millions of patient records under HIPAA and SOC 2 controls. In this data, an error is a clinical risk, not a UX bug.
- The platform carried the company from seed through its Series A without re-architecture, sustaining 50K+ transactions per day at handoff. Led a team of 4 Rails engineers.
- Stress-tested the Maquina tooling here. Making a coding agent work correctly against strict data contracts and integration dependencies required solving the context problem first, and that became the core product.
Aoorora · Co-founder & CTO
API-first core banking platform for Mexican FinTech
- Built the lending infrastructure Mexican FinTech startups were missing: single-payment credits, recurring credit cycles and full loan-lifecycle management, delivered API-first in Rails.
- Enforced strict tenant data isolation and a complete audit trail from day one: every query tenant-scoped, every state change recorded, every API call traceable. Designed around those constraints, not retrofitted to them.
- Led an 8-person engineering team. Integrated 3 lending clients, each awaiting CNBV authorization under Mexico’s Ley Fintech to launch.
- Aoorora wound down in 2023 when the funding runway ended; no client had yet cleared CNBV authorization.
michelada.io · Co-founder & CTO
Rails consultancy · acquired by Arkus Nexus in 2020
- Co-founded and scaled the firm from zero to 80 people in five years, leading an engineering organization of 75 across 30+ clients including Levi’s LATAM and Walmart Labs.
- Brownfield rescues: diagnosed stalled Rails applications, decided what to save and what to rewrite, and executed migrations with zero planned downtime.
- Greenfield: acted as technical co-founder on contract for non-technical founders, covering architecture decisions, the engineering baseline and a codebase the next team could actually work in.
- Present from day zero through exit.
Selected client engagements
Atipica · San Francisco, CA · Principal Engineer
HR technology platform
- Architected a high-performance data ingestion pipeline processing hundreds of thousands of CVs.
- Built analytics systems for candidate matching and hiring insights.
- Developed integrations with major tech companies including Slack, Uber and Thumbtack.
- Led technical initiatives to improve platform scalability and performance.
Kueski · México · Platform Engineer
Leading Mexican lending platform
- Developed AML and suspicious-activity monitoring dashboards.
- Created automated regulatory compliance reporting.
- Built KYC verification systems.
- Architected REST APIs for internal system integration.
Billfloat · San Francisco, CA · Backend Engineer
Financial services platform
- Led a major Ruby on Rails application modernization.
- Implemented integrations with ML credit scoring, ACH processing and utility payment systems.
- Optimized customer onboarding and the loan origination flow.
- Improved platform stability and reliability metrics.
Gastronaut · Co-founder
Food delivery startup · Mexico City
- Co-founded a food delivery company offering a curated menu from selected Mexico City restaurants, including dishes made exclusively for Gastronaut.
- Built the Rails back end that managed the menu and customer apps and routed orders to partner restaurants and delivery services.
- Built the customer iOS app with RubyMotion.
- The company closed before launch.
Crowd Interactive · Software Engineer → Business Development Manager
Rails consultancy serving client companies
- Built and maintained Rails applications for the firm’s clients as a software engineer.
- Worked closely with Heroku and Engine Yard, the firm’s hosting partners, on client deployments.
- In my final year, moved into business development and closed accounts including GoPro.
Reiter Affiliated Companies · Independent Contractor · Data Integrator
Oxnard, CA · parent of BerryMex, the largest fresh multi-berry producer in the US and Mexico
- Integrated data from the company’s MRP system, running on Microsoft SQL Server, across its operations.
- Consolidated that data at headquarters and built a data warehouse for reporting and operations analysis.
- Built a Ruby on Rails 2.x application for manual data entry across Reiter’s many ranches and branch locations, feeding the consolidated data at headquarters. Built in 2008, this was my first production Rails application.
Panasonic · Special Projects
Manufacturing · mainframe to ERP migration
- Developed in Visual Basic and Java, and on the mainframe in COBOL, JCL and Easytrieve.
- Helped migrate and implement Oracle ERP, moving many mainframe applications onto the integrated ERP.
- Focused on production-line scheduling and capacity, inventory and finance.
Education
Instituto Tecnológico de Tijuana · Computer Science Engineering (Ingeniería en Sistemas Computacionales)
Tijuana, Baja California, México
Skills
Ruby on Rails backend
- Rich domain models, CRUD-only controllers, concerns instead of service objects
- Background jobs on Sidekiq/Redis and Solid Queue; caching with Redis and Solid Cache
- PostgreSQL and SQLite in production, including continuous backup
- Mountable engines and published gems, including
maquina_components,maquina_streamandmaquina_credentials - Passwordless auth, an OAuth 2 provider, Rack::Attack, Brakeman, bundler-audit
Frontend & product design
- Hotwire: Turbo Drive, Frames, Streams, broadcasts and morphing
- Stimulus, importmap and Propshaft without a Node build
- Author of a Rails design system: ERB components on Tailwind 4, with a data-attribute API
- PWAs, Web Push, Action Text with Trix and Lexxy
- React, TypeScript and Vite where they fit; WebXR/Three.js AR library
- Own product definition, UX and visual design on every project
Go & systems
- Long-running daemon: claims work, keeps a durable bbolt spool, streams over SSE and long-poll, installs itself as an OS service
- CLIs with Cobra; terminal UIs with Bubble Tea, Huh and Lip Gloss
- OS keyring credentials, file locking, semver resolution
- Release packaging: Homebrew tap,
curl | sh, .deb, .rpm, Windows
Infrastructure & operations
- Years on AWS (EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3), Heroku and Engine Yard
- Migrated apps to Kamal 2 + Thruster on own servers with Docker
- Custom deploy pipelines that add operational tools before the build
- Every app behind Cloudflare, with caching, page and security (WAF) rules
- GitHub Actions CI, Cloudflare Workers and Pages, S3-compatible storage
- Self-hosting 37signals ONCE apps such as Fizzy and Campfire
AI engineering
- Author of Nexo, an agent harness on RubyLLM that treats an untrusted model as hostile by default: virtual sandbox, read-only permissions, fail-closed tool gating and an inspectable event log for every run
- Cost and token architecture for running agents against real codebases
- Creator of Rails MCP Server (571★); MCP servers with OAuth in Liminal and Recuerd0
- LLM memory with SQLite full-text search instead of embeddings, with the trade-offs published
- Streaming LLM output to the browser with repair of incomplete markdown
- Claude Code plugins, skills and agent workflows used daily
Quality & ways of working
- Minitest: model, controller and integration tests; fixtures; WebMock
- Tests built on seams instead of mocks; convention tests that guard architecture
- Spec-driven development, Standard Ruby, Herb linting
- Remote and async since long before it was the default
- Community: Rails MX organizer, author of Aprendiendo Ruby on Rails, speaker on AI-assisted development
Products I designed, built and run
Fragua fragua.app
AI agent orchestrator for Rails teams. Turns feature specs into shipped pull requests, with full visibility into agent work and cost. A Go execution host runs agents on the user's own machine, so code and tokens never leave it.
Recuerd0 recuerd0.ai
Version-controlled knowledge base that serves project context to Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT through a REST API and MCP. Self-hostable, with a Go CLI.
Halua halua.app
Commission-free micro-sites for Mexican vacation-rental owners: one property page, one link, one booking-request form. Uses LLM agents to draft and answer guest questions.
Liminal getliminal.app
Photographers send a shoot as one private link. Also covers portfolio sites and planning exhibitions in the browser. Ships an OAuth-protected MCP server so Claude can plan a show.
Maquina maquina.app
Open-source tools for developers who ship alone: a component library, generators, a newsletter engine, streaming markdown for Turbo, and Claude Code plugins for Rails.
Haab & Resto
Haab is a PWA appointment scheduler for Latin American professionals, with Google Calendar and WhatsApp. Resto is Kakeibo-style personal finance with a daily budget.
Open source, writing & community
Rails MCP Server 571★ · 36 forks
Model Context Protocol server that gives AI assistants structured, token-efficient access to Rails codebases. Runs in Claude Code, Claude Desktop and GitHub Copilot agent workflows. Uses progressive tool discovery to save tokens and is hardened against path traversal and shell injection.
Nexo agent harness
Built on the thesis that an agent is a model plus a harness. Adds a sandbox and permissions layer (virtual, local, container) and a run lifecycle with an inspectable event log on top of RubyLLM. Undeclared agents get a virtual sandbox with read-only rights, and MCP tool access fails closed.
maquina_components 139★
Rails UI component library on ERB, Tailwind 4 and Stimulus.
rails-upgrade-skill 83★ · rails-claude-code 47★
Claude skills and plugins for Rails upgrades, simplification and UI standards.
Aprendiendo Ruby on Rails book & course
Teaches modern Rails to Spanish-speaking developers across Latin America, published at railsenespanol.co.
Rails MX organizer
Organizer of the Mexican Ruby on Rails community and maintainer of the Maquina open-source ecosystem.
Talks
- 2026From Prompt to MVP · Claude Colima
- 2025Programando con AI: lo bueno, lo malo y lo real · Playa SonTec
- 2024Building a Modern Rails Application · Ruby Meetup
Rails versions in production
Upgrade work covers old 2.x apps brought forward to modern Rails, plus Redis/Sidekiq to Solid Queue and Heroku/AWS to Kamal migrations. I packaged that experience as the open-source Rails Upgrade Assistant for Claude Code.
How my experience maps to typical Rails roles
| Typical requirement | Evidence |
|---|---|
| 5+ years of deep Rails experience | 15+ years, Rails 2.x to 8.1, including major upgrades |
| Edge Rails and Hotwire | All current apps on Rails 8.1 and Ruby 4.0 with Turbo and Stimulus; Hotwire gems published |
| PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq | Long production use; migrations to the Solid stack when it simplified operations |
| AWS, Heroku, Cloud66-style hosting | Years on AWS, Heroku and Engine Yard (including partner work at Crowd Interactive); now also Kamal 2 on owned servers, fronted by Cloudflare |
| Minitest and TDD | Minitest across every app, including integration and convention tests |
| AI tools in the daily workflow | Builds them: Rails MCP Server (571★), the Nexo harness, Fragua, Recuerd0 and Claude Code plugins |
| Full ownership, product mindset | Product, design, code and operations for seven shipped products |
| Regulated domains | HIPAA and SOC 2 clinical data across 10 EHR integrations; core banking under Mexico’s Ley Fintech with tenant isolation and full audit trails; AML, KYC and compliance reporting at Kueski; ACH and credit scoring at Billfloat |
| Legacy migration and rewrites | Brownfield rescues at michelada.io with zero planned downtime; led the Rails modernization at Billfloat; moved mainframe applications to Oracle ERP at Panasonic |
| Leadership | CTO twice; led engineering teams of 75, 8 and 4; scaled a consultancy from zero to acquisition; business development that closed GoPro |
| Scale and reliability | 50K+ transactions per day and millions of patient records; seed to Series A without re-architecture; ingestion of hundreds of thousands of CVs at Atipica |