Ivan
Founder, Architect & Business Strategist
A business-oriented engineer. He starts with what the business needs and builds the system that delivers it. Tourism operators come to him with a calendar that will not fill and a booking process held together by WhatsApp, spreadsheets and goodwill. He ships the platform that fixes it — real-time availability, online payments, gift vouchers, admin dashboards — and the SEO and ad campaigns that keep the bookings coming.
Two decades of engineering at scale sit behind that, most formatively at Atlassian in Sydney and Amsterdam. But the code was always the means. What he delivers is a business that works better than it did last quarter.
Overview
An engineer who thinks about the business first. He builds the software, and he understands what it has to earn.
Most of that came from working the whole cycle himself — quoting the work, delivering it, invoicing it, and supporting it when it broke at the worst possible moment. Sitting across the table from clients teaches what a salaried engineering career never does: a feature nobody asked for is a cost, not an asset, and a roadmap is a commercial document before it is a technical one.
The engineering half is just as real, and it is the half he loves. Years in production taught him how systems fail under load, what an un-rollbackable release costs at 3am, and why the hardest part of scale is rarely the code.
So the conversation starts with your margins, your season and your conversion rate, not your stack. He works out what will actually move them, then builds it himself. AI supplies the throughput; knowing what is worth building supplies the value.
Career Path
Founder, Architect & Principal Engineer
The Flying DevilLanzarote, Canary IslandsNowRuns the studio end to end: finds the clients, scopes the work against what it will earn them, builds it, and stays on the hook for it afterwards. Tourism operators are the core — the booking platform and the campaigns that fill it, sold as one outcome rather than two projects. One senior engineer directing AI, delivering what used to take a team.
Bookings & ReservationsStripe PaymentsSEOGoogle AdsNext.jsAI-Directed DeliveryTeam Lead
AtlassianAmsterdam, NetherlandsLed an engineering team: delivery, planning and hiring alongside hands-on engineering. Learned that shipping at scale is as much about people, priorities and saying no as it is about architecture.
Team LeadershipDeliveryHiring & MentoringSenior Developer
AtlassianSydney, AustraliaWorked on the media platform behind attachments, previews and thumbnails — serving media files to millions of users. High-traffic distributed systems, uncompromising code review, and on-call reality. Won ShipIt Days, Atlassian's company-wide hackathon.
Media PlatformDistributed SystemsHigh TrafficShipIt Days WinnerFounder & Consultant
Own Business & FreelanceSpainBack in Spain: consulting for clients, running his own business, and shipping web products end to end. Quoting the work, delivering it, invoicing it and supporting it — the education in business reality that no engineering job gives you.
ConsultingBusiness OwnerWeb ProductsClient DeliverySoftware Engineer
Multinational Software CompaniesBrazilFrom 2002Moved to Brazil and worked for multinational software companies, on large systems and distributed teams across time zones and languages. First real taste of enterprise engineering — and of building software far from where it was designed.
Enterprise SoftwareDistributed TeamsPortugueseDeveloper & Founder
Freelance & First StartupZaragoza, SpainWhere it startedFreelance development, building things nobody asked for, and founding his first startup — back when shipping a website meant owning the whole stack, including the server under the desk.
FreelanceFirst StartupFull StackSelf-Taught
It starts with the business, not the brief. What a booking actually earns you, where customers drop out, what a no-show costs — those answers decide what gets built, and in what order.
Small scope, shipped continuously. Something real goes live in weeks rather than at the end of a six-month plan, so you can steer it while it is still cheap to steer. Priorities can change between any two releases.
You talk to the person building it. No account manager relaying requirements, no team to brief. Whoever scoped the work writes the code and picks up the phone when something breaks.
Built to be left alone. Tests, CI and monitoring from day one, because the platform has to keep taking bookings on a Sunday in August when the whole season depends on it.
“Technology is a means, not an end. The only metric that matters is whether the business is better off.
Architecture is judgement, and judgement comes from having carried the cost of the wrong call. The best technical decision is usually the smaller one that ships this month.
Build things that make real money for real people, ship them fast, listen to what the numbers say, and never stop iterating.”
From the Trenches
Good days serving media files to millions of users
Hackathon: ShipIt Days #1 Champion
Sharing projects with amazing colleagues