👋 About me
I'm Diego, a Chilean 🇨🇱 who has been in Berlin since April 2023. Moving here was a dream I'd carried since university. Two friends did an exchange in Germany and came home comparing everything to Chile, and I realized I didn't want to just hear their stories. I wanted to live it and form my own opinion. The decision wasn't easy, but I made it.
Since landing, I've thrown myself into it: learning the culture, building real friendships, and getting out into the city. Bouldering, biking, and hunting down every green space I can find (I do miss the mountains, though. Berlin is very flat 😅). The job market has been a real challenge, and rather than let the rejections define me, I leaned hard into learning German. I earned my Goethe-Institut B1 certificate and have since completed coursework up to C1.1, and I'm still climbing. Picking it up this fast is one of the things I'm proudest of here. A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.
On the work side, I'm a backend engineer with 3+ years building APIs and microservices on AWS, GCP, and Azure. I like taking a system from a rough idea all the way to production: modeling the database, designing the API, then staying close to it through deployment and whatever breaks after. I do my best work on small teams where I can fully own things rather than hand off pieces of a puzzle.
Experience
Jul 2022 – Jan 2023
Full Stack Engineer · IX Comercio (Intcomex)
Founding member of a new Payment Team; built a payment orchestrator end-to-end, from database design to production deployment on Azure.
Dec 2021 – Jul 2022
Software Engineer · Falabella Retail S.A.
Owned GCP microservices delivery end-to-end and stepped in as backup Tech Lead across reviews, client communication, and documentation.
95% logistics ops automatedMar 2021 – Nov 2021
Software Engineer · ALeRCE Astronomical Project
Maintained and scaled a Kafka-based AWS pipeline processing millions of telescope alert events per night.
Millions telescope alerts processed nightlyALeRCE project ↗Jul 2019 – Sep 2019
Full Stack Developer Trainee · Drimo (ex Rokketslab)
Built React components and Node.js APIs within a custom internal framework; first hands-on exposure to AWS S3 and GraphQL in a product context.
Oct 2018
Backend Engineer (Freelance) · AVLA
Implemented a high-throughput system for external-service queries in Java Spring Boot, reducing per-query cost for the client.
Skills
Languages & Frameworks
- Python
- FastAPI
- Django
- Flask
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Java
- Spring Boot
- SQL
Databases
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- SQLAlchemy
- Sequelize
Cloud & Infrastructure
- AWS (Lambda, S3, EC2, EKS)
- GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub)
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Kafka
- Terraform
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
Observability & Tooling
- REST API Design
- Microservices
- Elasticsearch / Kibana
- WinstonJS
- Log4j
- Git
- JIRA
Data & Analytics
- BigQuery
- Pandas
- Google Data Analytics Certificate (2026)
Frontend
- React
- Vue.js
🌍 Languages
- SpanishNative
- EnglishFluent
- GermanGoethe-Institut B1 certified, coursework to C1.1
Education
B.Sc. Computer Science
Universidad de Santiago de Chile
2015 – 2020
Forensic Computer Expertise
Universidad de Santiago de Chile
2019
Google Data Analytics Certificate
Coursera / Google
2026
Additional
Teaching assistant (Ayudante), Universidad de Santiago de Chile
Ran supplementary classes for fellow students in courses I'd already completed: Programming and Software Engineering Methodology. Taught Agile practices, bootstrapping Spring Boot projects with Maven, and CI/CD tooling including Jenkins and SonarQube.
1st Place, DefHack Hackathon Chile (2018)
Built WallyBot, a Telegram chatbot for student scheduling (Microsoft Bot Framework, C#), in a 26-hour competition organised by Microsoft, NASA, and DefHack.