Experience
From particle physics to national digital services.
Twenty years across research, consulting, e-commerce, insurance, telecom and digital government, in Spain, Switzerland and Singapore.
About Me
I'm Engineering Director at GovTech Singapore, leading TradeNet, the national single-window platform for global trade and digital customs clearance. The mission is to make Singapore the world's easiest place to trade.
I've spent twenty years across telecom, insurance, e-commerce, consulting and research, building engineering organisations and modernising the core systems a business can't stop. Most recently that was 100+ engineers and 30+ BSS/OSS applications at Singtel, moved to cloud with zero rollback and under the approved budget.
What I enjoy most is coaching engineers and managers into confident leaders, then watching them outgrow what I could teach them. Outside the day job I sit on SUTD's ISTD External Advisory Board, write about engineering leadership and platform engineering, and speak at conferences across the region.
Basque by origin, Singaporean by choice for the past twelve years.
What I do best
Core platform modernisation
Legacy cores replatformed, re-architected or replaced while the business keeps running on them.
Cloud and platform engineering
Shared platforms, pipelines and engineering standards that make a hundred engineers faster.
Engineering leadership at scale
Organisations built and leaders grown from within, from a four-engineer team to a hundred-plus across countries.
Applied AI on enterprise cores
Agentic platforms over the systems of record, AI inside the SDLC, and the guardrails that make both safe to run.
Commercial ownership
Business cases taken through executive approval, vendor contracts renegotiated, critical systems brought in-house.
Hands-on by choice
Still building, because it is the fastest way to know what to ask of engineers and what to promise a business.
Timeline
Singapore
Engineering Director
Leading 60+ engineers on TradeNet, Singapore's national single-window platform for global trade and digital customs clearance.
Singapore
Senior Director, Software Engineering, Consumer
Led 100+ engineers across Singapore and Pune and about S$15M a year, running the 30+ core BSS/OSS applications behind every consumer order, bill and activation.
- Delivered the S$54.3M modernisation of the 30-application BSS core onto Azure, 25% under capex, with zero rollback
- Billing accuracy at 99.996% and zero P1/P2 in the billing core; cyber maturity at Level 3, Bitsight rating A
- Set the division's AI direction: MCP servers with 15+ governed tools over the BSS core, and agentic coding across the SDLC with guardrails adopted group-wide
- Built the leadership layer from within; engagement 88%, turnover 2.8% against 11.9% company-wide
Singapore
Senior Director, Software Engineering, Digital Technology
Built and led the backend engineering organisation for Singtel's digital channels: 100 engineers in 13 squads and 150+ backend services.
- Created Backend-as-a-Service: 30+ capabilities behind six channels, delivery velocity up 60%
- Moved 150+ services onto one engineering standard; backend incidents down 80%
- Doubled the team to 100 engineers by insourcing from vendors; attrition 5% against 24.7% division-wide
Singapore
Deputy VP, Software Engineering & Architecture
Led 20+ engineers and architects across Distribution Platforms and AI, DevOps and Architecture. Designed the SDLC, architecture standards and governance; launched Pulse by Prudential; led the AI products, askPRU and e-Claims automation.
Singapore
Staff Software Engineer, Engineering Coach
Led Pivotal Labs engagements for DBS, Sun Electric and Singapore Airlines (the SIA booking and check-in app, rebuilt from scratch), delivered for Ford, and owned the Singapore office's XP workshop.
Singapore
Engineering Manager, Senior Leadership Team
Senior Leadership Team, 15 engineers. Re-architected the platform from PHP to React and microservices (All-Stores page 90% faster) and scaled it to six markets.
Singapore
Lead Software Engineer, Warehouse Tools
Led the Warehouse Tools team: a picking platform that raised pick rate 20%, the company-wide MongoDB upgrade, and the shared microservice library.
Singapore
Lead Software Engineer
Hired and led the engineering team for a property estate management platform on AWS, with fully automated CI/CD.
Geneva, Switzerland
Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer
Led much of the development of Indico, CERN's open-source event management platform. Before that, platform engineer on the ETICS build and test service.
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Senior Project Technician
Coordinated NextCESGA, an EU FP7 research project.
Vigo, Spain
Senior Software Developer
Mainframe banking system for Caixanova (COBOL, CICS, DB2).
Madrid, Spain
Software Analyst
New mainframe system for BBVA (COBOL, CICS, IMS, DB2).
Advisory
Since Apr 2023 — advising the Information Systems Technology and Design faculty on curriculum, and on how the programme prepares students for professional software engineering.
Education
- Chief Technology Officer Programme, Organizational Leadership
NUS Advanced Computing for Executives · 2023 – 2024 - Certificate of Advanced Studies, Information Technologies
University of Santiago de Compostela · 2008 – 2010 - Master's Degree, Computer Engineering
University of Deusto · 2005 – 2007 - Bachelor's Degree, Technical Engineering in Business Data Processing
University of Deusto · 2002 – 2005