CV – Résumé

Senior Engineering Manager / Frontend Engineer / Designer

Agustín Amenábar L.

Summary

Graphic designer by training, software developer by passion, addicted to Continuous Delivery.

Doing the most varied work in tech since 2004, always elbow to elbow with designers, Product, and Business. From UX to server–side optimization, a wide view of problems usually lets me find solutions where they are most effective.

Work Experience

Feb 2018 – Today: EQS Group

Supporting the 5 Cloud Teams of the IR COCKPIT.

Company dedicated to provide a software platform and services for Investor Relations, Communication and Corportate Compliance. With most of the German DAX companies as customers. And the biggest European provider of Whistleblower software.

I joined the Frontend team responsible for building the new flagship product of the company in Angular 5+ and the emerging Component Library.

In late 2019, took the technical responsibility for the “new Cockpit”, reorganized the engineering teams, and grew it to 5 Teams.

In late 2022, moved to the Corporate Compliance division where the task has been to integrate the engineering teams coming from the BK acquisition into our Private Cloud Kubernetes Infrastructure, Frontend tech stack, and engineering culture.

Roles:

  • Senior Engineering Manager
    • BKMS System: Enterprise Compliance Whistleblower SaaS (present)
    • IR COCKPIT (5 Teams) (Until September 2022)
  • Team Lead of the Frontend engineers (Until September 2019)
  • Senior Frontend Engineer (Until March 2019)

Responsibilities:

  • Managing managers, tech teams and individual contributors.
  • Career progression and performance assessment framework.
  • Product planning & technical roadmap.
  • Resource & capacity planning and budgeting.
  • Active member of the ISMS
  • Hiring: Recruiting, creating tests and taking interviews.
  • Architectural reviews of technical initiatives, from whiteboard to code reviews.
  • Onboarding for engineers and managers.
  • Our Component Library using Storybook and ng-packager.
  • Release Management / Release protocol.
  • Frontend Training for developers starting on Frontend.
  • HTML, CSS, Typescript + Angular development.

Dec 2014 – Feb 2018: Westwing Home and Living

Senior Frontend Engineer

Ecommerce retail company dedicated to home, living, furniture and style with daily online sales with millions of monthly users. Here I did the frontend development for the redesign of the most visited pages in the website.

Responsibilities:

  • Frontend: ES5, ES6, Backbone, jQuery, Require.js, Browserify, Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, and other obscure tech.
  • PHP backend development: Yii, Wordpress.
  • AB tests implementation with Optimizely and a proprietary system.
  • Frontend architecture: Lead the Frontend sync.
  • Recruiting assistance, creating tests and taking interviews.
  • Leading driver of frontend performance.

May 2006 – Nov 2014: VOXEL → MEDULA DISEÑO

Partner and Senior Full Stack Developer

Client services agency dedicated to Web Design, Graphic Design, interactive design and software development. Branch of Voxel Multimedia.
On April of 2009 one partner sold his part to my wife and me and we became Médula Diseño where my wife Violeta Sánchez E. does most of the design job and I lead the the development. The agency grew up to become a team of 6 (plus some friendly contractors).

Portfolio: All of the work in medula.cl has been done under my lead; most, directly by me. I have created several long relationships with customers and organizations which enable constant iteration of projects even on tight budgets.

Responsibilities:

  • Project management.
  • Recruiting and Hiring.
  • Design and development of: – Websites. – Custom web software (web apps). – POP multimedia interactive software (Flash, Director, and web).
  • Illustration

May 2005 – April 2006: VOXEL MULTIMEDIA

Designer / Web Designer

Client services agency dedicated to 3 areas:
Graphic Design, interactive design and web development.
Audiovisual production and post-production.
3D modeling, animation and rendering.

Here I worked on the design and development of websites and multimedia interactive software (Flash and Director).


Skills

Tools I’ve learned to use and leverage.

Front & Back -end

  • HTML / CSS – (10+ years) Responsive web design, progressive enhancement, modern browser APIs, mobile first.
  • JavaScript: ES5, ES6+ (10+ years)
  • TypeScript: AKA productive JavaScript (3+ years)
  • Angular + RxJS (3+ year)
  • SEO and HTML semantic markup: <i> isn’t for icon. (10+ years)
  • Frontend Performance
  • VueJS (random projects)
  • jQuery, Backbone, AngularJS, Sencha Touch 2, ExtJS (MVC JavaScript) (too many years)
  • NodeJS, Expessjs & tooling (5+ years)
  • LAMP stack, several frameworks. (16 years)
  • MySQL (10+ years), Working knowledge of Mongodb and SQLite
  • Nginx (5+ years)
  • Drupal, WordPress, Joomla (too many years)
  • AWS (whatever I need)

Management Toolset

Managing teams and managers requires an extended toolset over coding.

  • One on ones
  • Agile principles
  • OKRs
  • Recruiting and hiring
  • Pair programing, design & code reviews
  • Retrospectives
  • Postmortems (blameless)
  • Whiteboarding
  • Project management
  • Monitoring and alerting (New Relic, ELK stack, ops genie, Jira)
  • CI/CD Pipelines
  • Mentors (for me and others)
  • Powerpoint 😅
  • Owning my failures

CI/CD: Testing & DevOps

  • Git (8+ years)
  • Docker (5 years)
  • Jenkins for CI/CD (6+ years)
  • bash scripting (7+ years)
  • Gitlab CI (1+ Years)
  • Cypress 💚
  • Karma + Jasmine (Angular)
  • Protractor + Selenium (e2e)
  • Selenium + Behat (e2e)
  • Mocha + Chai + Supertest
  • K8s (noob)

Design

  • UX / UI design: From wireframes to Component Libraries and Styleguides (15+ years)
  • Animation: Flash, CSS, JavaScript
  • Layout and Illustration: Illustrator, Photoshop, Sketch, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher
  • Project management and Client relations. (14+ years)
  • AB testing and usability testing
  • User tracking

Education

School

Colegio Cumbres, Santiago, Chile. (1986 – 1998)

College

Universidad Finis Terrae (1999 – 2005)

Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design.

Personal information

  • Full name: Bernardo Agustín Amenábar Larraín
  • Birth date: March 14, 1981
  • Residence: Munich, Germany
  • email: baamenabar@gmail.com
  • Telephone: +49 1512 0430 198
  • Nationality: Chilean
  • Marital status: Married ♥
  • Languages:
    • Bilingual Spanish & English
    • German basic (B1)

Personal projects

Some work fine and I use everyday, some are work in progress; all could use some more work.


Day to day Tools

My Toys

  • PhpStorm / VS Code / Sublime Text
  • bash / zsh
  • git
  • Gitlab & Gitlab ci
  • Google Chrome Developer Tools ♥
  • AWS
  • NodeJS (tooling)
  • Gitlab / Bitbucket / Github
  • Docker
  • Pen and paper, post-its (colors too)
  • Screencast-O-Matic
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe Lightroom
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Some other obscure tools

Dearest projects

All of the work in medula.cl has been done under my lead; most, directly by me. I have created several long relationships with customers and organizations which enable constant iteration of projects even on tight budgets. Some of the most notable are:

Printable cards web app

(2020)

https://cards.medula.cl/

Simple VueJS application with a serverless Google Cloud backend.

Simple app I wrote for creating and storing printable “handouts” for the DnD campaign I play with my kids. Took the chance to play with VueJS and some Google Cloud serverless products. Repo: https://github.com/baamenabar/printable-handout-cards

Flyimg: Image transformations microservice

(2017)

https://github.com/flyimg/flyimg

Dockerized PHP7 application runs as a Microservice to resize and crop images on the fly. Get optimised images with MozJPEG, WebP or PNG using ImageMagick.

Performance and image compression have been my pet peeves for years, this year I joined a friend to develop this microservice that generates images ready to be used in responsive projects.

I wrote the resizing and cropping algorithms, most of the documentation and the nginx config.


Westwing Redesign

(2015)

www.westwing.de, www.westwingnow.de

Coded most of the redesign of the two most visited pages at Westwing.de.

Recently coded most of the redesign and refactor of the whole product grid in it’s multiple incarnations.

Monitoring and pushing the frontend performance of the Westwing website, looking to get the highest impact with the lowest effort possible.


La Guía Silvestre / The Sylvan Guide : biodiversity and wild areas app.

(2014)

huilmo.org

My baby, a project in the making. A compiler of biodiversity guides, each aimed at specific locations, with geolocation and local storage of information. It currently can load, process and import Missions from Project Noah and compile them in a Ionic web-app.

Initially started with Sencha Touch 2, but switched to Ionic + AngularJS + NodeJS and fell in love with them.

I applied the project for seed funding, but on september 2014 got rejected for not having enough potential profit.

Note: the huilmo.org website was hacked together from a lousy template in one night, not my code.

The repo can be found at: https://github.com/baamenabar/vas