Ernesto Jiménez

About me

I am a product engineer and leader with over 15 years of experience in various industries, and I am passionate about taking ownership and delivering impact within inclusive teams.

I've thrived in start-ups and a scale-up, loving the cross-functional collaboration that drives excellent products. I have experience working across the whole stack, from front-end to setting up infrastructure, and I particularly enjoy working on back-end and distributed systems.

Although I have experience building and managing diverse teams, I'm seeking an individual contributor role to leverage my skills.

• Cross-functional Collaboration: working effectively with people around the business.
• Product Engineering: having experience developing on products from scratch as well as evolving large ones.
• Mentoring and Hiring: helping people grow and identifying and hiring great talent.
• Modern Engineering Practices: Automated Testing, Continuous Integration and Deployment, Component Driven UIs, Continuous Localisation, API Schemas, etc.
• Learning: enjoying getting speed with industries or technologies I never worked with in order to drive impact.
• Open Source: both as a contributor and a maintainer.
• Languages and Frameworks: Go, Terraform, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Google Cloud Platform, Ruby on Rails, and more.

Experience

Founding CTO at topi (December 2021 - Present)

I joined as their founding CTO as they were raising the pre-seed round to build the team and product from scratch. Within a year, we assembled the team, made our MVP and rolled it out to multiple sellers across telesales and eCommerce, iterated on it to achieve significant volumes, and raised our Series A.

• Getting our initial MVP out to market in under four months to demonstrate early traction.
• Building a fully remote and diverse engineering team from scratch, hiring +10 people in five countries with an outstanding gender balance.
• Developing our API-first product with modern best practices: containerised cloud infrastructure, continuous integration and deployment, continuous localisation, etc.
• Rolling out our data platform to make data easy to access, analyse, and explore across the business.
• Helping the founders close our Series A round from our top-tier investors.
• Mentoring people across the business
• Languages and frameworks: Go, TypeScript, React, Terraform, Google Cloud Platform, dbt.

Director of Engineering at GoCardless (June 2020 - November 2021)
Senior Engineering Manager (November 2018 - June 2020)
Engineering Manager (February 2017 - November 2018)

During my tenure at GoCardless, I started as a hands-on Engineering Manager. I grew with the company as we took it to the next level scale: 10x recurring revenue and processing volumes, 5x the size of the engineering organisation, expanding internationally from 3 to 8 markets, and launching new product offerings.

• Collaborating cross-functionally across the business to deliver new products and markets.
• Designing and implementing our new architecture to satisfy more complex needs as we increased scale and our product offering. We had to replace critical systems processing billions of pounds of transactions.
• Leading the delivery of strategic initiatives such as building and evolving our Global Payments Network.
• Starting our Developer Enablement team, including building a relationship with the Prometheus project to have people in my team develop a new major version of their Ruby client and become maintainers for the client.
• Partnering with Product to create a joint roadmap, ensuring it delivered on product impact and critical tech investments.
• Leading the engineering response to company-wide incidents, working alongside members of the CxO team.
• Hiring outstanding diverse talent: we grew the organisation from around 20 engineers to 140+, improving our team's diversity as part of the growth.
• Promoting equity and inclusion: working closely with our People team on policies and initiatives to improve the organisation, such as fairness in compensation across engineering or supporting people from under-represented groups.
• Languages and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes.

Co-founder at Slackline.io (June 2015 - October 2017)

We built a service allowing B2B collaboration between companies using Slack used by hundreds of companies worldwide. Our client base ranged from small start-ups and agencies to large enterprises like Akamai, News Corp, and Walmart.

• Working closely with customers to clearly understand what their needs were and what our product offering and roadmap had to be.
• Designing and implementing the platform's architecture focusing on low latency communication, horizontal scalability, and meeting our customers' strict privacy requirements.
• Building the partnership with the Slack platform team, providing feedback on APIs under development and partnering with them to launch new features.
• Languages and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Go, JavaScript.

CTO at Localistico (March 2014 - May 2015)

We built a product to enable business owners and chains to track and manage their business profiles on Foursquare, Yelp, and Google. We went from the idea to having a working product with customers in a few months, acquiring both SMEs and enterprises such as Foxtons and El Corte Inglés as customers.

• Developing the business model and a lean product roadmap with the CEO focused on launching and acquiring customers quickly with a solid value proposition.
• Supporting customer acquisition: preparing marketing collaterals, organising events, and meeting with partners and potential customers.
• Leading the definition, development, and delivery of the responsive web application and the different backend services.
• Languages and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Ember.js, Go.

Product Manager at Telefonica Digital (April 2012 - October 2013)

We worked on BlueVia, Telefónica's global payments and messaging APIs. Shortly after joining, Telefónica started working closely with Mozilla to develop and launch Firefox OS to the market. As part of that collaboration, we worked to deliver payments in the Firefox OS marketplace.

• Leading the efforts to deliver payments in the Firefox OS marketplace with credit cards and operator billing across different mobile operators to support the first wave of phone launches in Spain, Colombia, and Brazil.
• Contributing to the web payments API design so it could leverage direct-to-bill and was as secure and straightforward as possible.
• Collaborating with Partnerships and Legal to structure all the partnerships required for the Firefox OS marketplace payments. Part of the work involved developing close partnerships with several companies, and I led the efforts to source and structure the business deals.
• Leading the work to improve collaboration within BlueVia. We had to make significant changes to how the teams were structured and how they worked together to enable better communication across functions, work faster and deliver better results.

Web & Internet Expert at Standards & Industry Alliances - Vodafone R&D (May 2011 - April 2012)

We worked on specifications to improve mobile web and mobile internet, steering and advising on industry joint ventures, VC investments, and industry initiatives.

• Representing Vodafone in W3C on the Device APIs Working Group.
• Exploring trends and technologies in the industry, communicating their implications for the company and recommending ways to leverage them.
• Working with colleagues and stakeholders across different business departments to identify the most relevant technologies for the business, including Group Strategy, Terminals, Technology, User Experience, and the various R&D programs.
• Prototyping applications of new web technologies with various R&D teams to help them identify and assess new technologies they could leverage.
• Identifying and exploring partnership opportunities with other companies within the industry.
• Languages and frameworks: Node.js, JavaScript, Ruby, SproutCore 2 (later Ember.js).

Lead Developer at Six to Start (March 2010 - April 2011)

We developed games, apps, and concepts for companies like Disney, BBC, Wired Magazine, and New Scientist.

• Leading all engineering efforts for different projects, from proofs of concept and prototypes to launching full projects to customers.
• Contributing to product management, game design and development of new concepts.
• Working with clients to identify opportunities and requirements.
• Languages and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP.

Lead Software Engineer / Product Manager at Tractis.com (February 2006 - March 2010)

We built a platform to negotiate, manage and digitally sign contracts on the browser using electronic IDs issued by EU governments and certificates from government-recognised Certification Authorities. Once the contracts platform was running, we also built an Authentication API to allow third-party services to verify a user's identity using the electronic IDs.

• Leading product management and engineering of our web platform and APIs.
• Collaborating on the design of our service-oriented architecture, allowing us to use the most appropriate language for each service.
• Working with partners to integrate our platform into their contract management workflows.
• Languages and frameworks: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, PHP.

Education

Computer Science (BSc) at Polytechnic University of Valencia (September 2004 - July 2007)

• Exchange student in Helsinki University of Technology (September 2006 - June 2007)
• Final project was course on Product Development Project for Nokia in Helsinki. I joined a multidisciplinary team with students from the Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design and MIT.
• Published a paper on 2006: A Penalisation-Based Ranking Approach for the Mixed Monolingual Task of WebCLEF 2006. David Pinto, Paolo Rosso and Ernesto Jiménez