{ "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsonresume/resume-schema/v1.0.0/schema.json", "basics": { "name": "Nicolás Cárdenas Valdez", "label": "Lead Backend Engineer", "email": "niccarval@hotmail.com", "url": "https://nicolascardenas.dev", "image": "https://nicolascardenas.dev/nicolas.jpg", "summary": "Lead Backend Engineer with 5+ years building production systems at scale. Designs distributed backends and owns features end to end — from gRPC microservices and the API gateway down to the Kubernetes and CI/CD that run them — with a focus on correctness under failure: idempotency, compensation, and resilient integrations.", "location": { "city": "Mexico City", "countryCode": "MX" }, "profiles": [ { "network": "LinkedIn", "username": "nicolas-cardenas-valdez", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-cardenas-valdez-602322220" }, { "network": "GitHub", "username": "NicolasCV", "url": "https://github.com/NicolasCV" } ] }, "work": [ { "name": "Zazpay", "position": "Lead Backend Engineer", "startDate": "2023-07", "location": "Mexico City (Hybrid)", "summary": "Lead backend on a consumer-lending fintech platform (~20 microservices, API gateway, web/mobile frontends, shared infrastructure). Led a small backend team and owned features from requirements and system design through implementation, testing, and production deployment.", "highlights": [ "Owned personal loans end to end — the company's highest-revenue product — from system design through implementation, testing, and production.", "Owned the BNPL product end to end (credit lines, confirmation and one-shot payment flows, dynamic plans, resilience).", "Owned Sunflow, the multi-channel messaging product driving collections (cobranza) over WhatsApp, SMS, email, and voice.", "Led the AI-model integration with the data team (embedding- and LLM-powered features).", "Built fault-tolerant money movement (idempotency, timeouts, circuit breakers, compensation) and hardened the core-banking (Mambu) integration.", "Designed and ran GitOps delivery in production with ArgoCD on GKE; led the CI/CD migration from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions across ~8 services.", "Instrumented the platform with Datadog (APM, logs, traces) and managed cloud infrastructure with Terraform." ] }, { "name": "Nolu.AI", "position": "Software Engineer / DevOps", "startDate": "2025-03", "location": "Remote", "summary": "Designed, developed, and deployed end-to-end products with AI integrations for client companies (incl. Pied and Happymile), owning each from architecture through cloud deployment and CI/CD.", "highlights": [ "For Happymile (cross-border US/MX trucking & logistics), replaced slow manual Excel reconciliation with custom software — a Python/FastAPI engine (pandas, MongoDB) that ingests billing and trip spreadsheets, auto-classifies freight routes, and computes extra-kilometer and toll costs — behind a React/TypeScript operator app on Cloud Run + Firebase.", "Extended Happymile into a multi-region (US/MX) Transportation Management System (FastAPI + DynamoDB, React) on AWS ECS Fargate + Amplify, with Terraform-managed infrastructure and GitHub Actions CI/CD.", "Optimized client workflows by moving spreadsheet-bound processes into dedicated software and APIs, turning hours of manual work into seconds." ] }, { "name": "Presta Vale", "position": "Software Engineer", "startDate": "2022-05", "endDate": "2023-07", "location": "Culiacán (Hybrid)", "summary": "Full-stack engineer in a small, agile team building financial-services products from the ground up.", "highlights": [ "Built the platform's authentication gateway.", "Independently built a financial-services chatbot on Hasura, PostgreSQL, and GraphQL.", "Refactored legacy code behind new adapters, raising security and maintainability.", "Delivered end to end across React, React Native, Next.js, LoopBack, Express, MongoDB, and MySQL." ] }, { "name": "Softtek (Constellation Brands)", "position": "EA Software Intern", "startDate": "2022-07", "endDate": "2022-12", "location": "Monterrey", "highlights": [ "Programmed enterprise-architecture integrations with Node, Atlassian Forge, and LeanIX." ] }, { "name": "John Deere Shared Services", "position": "Software Intern", "startDate": "2021-06", "endDate": "2022-05", "location": "Monterrey", "highlights": [ "Developed test cases and performed SIL (Software-in-the-Loop) testing; automated report generation with Python." ] } ], "projects": [ { "name": "Sunflow Agent", "description": "Conversational-AI agent for support & collections: a LangGraph state machine over embedding-based intent classification, RAG (Qdrant), and tool-calling, with a pluggable LLM provider layer.", "keywords": ["Python", "FastAPI", "LangGraph", "Qdrant", "OpenAI", "RAG"] }, { "name": "Pied", "description": "Multi-tenant operations CRM with AI insights — OpenAI task auto-classification and an admin insights dashboard; JWT multi-tenancy, RBAC, audit logging.", "keywords": ["FastAPI", "MongoDB", "React", "OpenAI", "Cloud Run"] }, { "name": "AI Video Pipeline", "description": "7-stage async orchestrator turning a topic into a finished video, with a pluggable multi-provider stack (LLMs, image, video, TTS, STT) and Remotion + FFmpeg rendering.", "keywords": ["Python", "Remotion", "FFmpeg", "Claude", "ElevenLabs"] }, { "name": "Mayweather", "description": "Real-time prediction-markets data platform ingesting Kalshi and Polymarket order books via REST + WebSockets into PostgreSQL time-series storage.", "keywords": ["Python", "FastAPI", "PostgreSQL", "WebSockets"] }, { "name": "PadelRank", "description": "React Native + Expo app for real-time padel ranking and matchmaking, with end-to-end-encrypted messaging over an offline queue.", "keywords": ["React Native", "Expo", "Socket.io", "Signal Protocol"] }, { "name": "Rust Git TUI", "description": "Terminal-based Git client written in Rust.", "keywords": ["Rust", "ratatui", "tokio", "git2"] } ], "skills": [ { "name": "Languages", "keywords": ["TypeScript", "JavaScript", "Python", "SQL", "Rust", "C/C++"] }, { "name": "Backend & APIs", "keywords": ["NestJS", "Node.js", "gRPC", "Protobuf", "REST", "GraphQL", "FastAPI"] }, { "name": "Data & Messaging", "keywords": ["PostgreSQL", "Prisma", "Redis", "Bull/BullMQ", "Apache Kafka", "MongoDB"] }, { "name": "Cloud & DevOps", "keywords": ["GCP", "Kubernetes (GKE)", "Docker", "GitHub Actions", "ArgoCD", "Terraform"] }, { "name": "Architecture", "keywords": ["Microservices", "Distributed systems", "Sagas", "Idempotency", "Resilience", "Event-driven"] }, { "name": "Observability & Testing", "keywords": ["Datadog", "OpenTelemetry", "Jest", "Testcontainers", "Sentry"] } ], "education": [ { "institution": "Tecnológico de Monterrey", "area": "Software Engineering (Ingeniero en Tecnologías Computacionales)", "studyType": "Bachelor of Science", "startDate": "2019", "endDate": "2023" } ], "certificates": [ { "name": "AWS Academy — Cloud Foundations", "issuer": "Amazon Web Services", "date": "2022" }, { "name": "AWS Academy — Machine Learning Foundations", "issuer": "Amazon Web Services", "date": "2022" }, { "name": "Introduction to Terraform Cloud", "issuer": "A Cloud Guru", "date": "2022" }, { "name": "Certified EA Practitioner", "issuer": "SAP LeanIX", "date": "2022" }, { "name": "Postman Student Expert", "issuer": "Postman", "date": "2022" } ], "languages": [ { "language": "Spanish", "fluency": "Native" }, { "language": "English", "fluency": "C1 / Advanced" }, { "language": "French", "fluency": "Limited working" } ], "meta": { "canonical": "https://nicolascardenas.dev/profile.json", "version": "1.0.0", "lastModified": "2026-06-02" } }