About
About me
I’m Juan, a design engineer and agentic automation architect, and a dad of two. For 25 years I’ve designed and built for the web, from the interface a person touches to the systems underneath. I started in industrial and brand design, taught myself to build because I couldn’t stand good design let down by weak execution, and grew from the first in-house developer at a US company into its Director of Technology. Along the way I’ve been shipping my own products since before the internet was everywhere, always chasing the same thing: turning the storm of ideas in my head into something real. Today I build AI-native products end to end, directing agents while keeping the architecture, the judgment, and the quality bar my own.
Design
Industrial and brand design is where I come from, and it still anchors everything I make. UI, UX, interaction and visual design, done by hand when precision matters. I care as much about how a product looks, feels and reads as about whether the system underneath is sound. Design thinking first: understand the problem before opening any tool.
Skills
- UI/UX Design
- Visual Design
- Brand & Identity
- Interaction Design
- Design Systems
- Figma
- Prototyping
- Product Design
Engineering
I build across the whole stack. React, Next.js, Node and TypeScript, with Postgres and relational data, REST APIs, and deployment on Vercel. Front-end where the craft shows, back-end where the system holds. I learned to code to protect the design, and I’ve shipped production software for years, including a site that ran eight years untouched.
Skills
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node
- Python
- Postgres
- REST APIs
- Tailwind
- Vercel
- Hand-written HTML/CSS/JS
AI & Agentic Systems
I build AI-natively, and I bring years of hands-on engineering to it. I direct coding agents and hold them to a standard: I own the architecture, the guardrails, the evaluation, and the quality bar. The agents move fast; deciding what is correct, what will hold, and what ships stays with me, because that judgment is exactly what experience buys. I design both agentic and conventional systems, using AI to move at the speed of a team without lowering the bar. My clearest proof is The Hallucination Herald, a newspaper run entirely by around 20 orchestrated AI agents.
Skills
- Agent Architecture
- Orchestration
- Guardrails
- Evals & Observability
- Claude Code
- Python
- LLM APIs
- Prompt Design
- RAG
Leadership
I spent 16 years at a US company, growing from its first in-house developer to Director of Technology. I set technical and product direction, built and led teams of designers and developers, defined hiring standards, and mentored people across levels. My method is simple: detect the problem before it becomes unsolvable, and act early. I don’t work for a company, I work as if it were mine.
Skills
- Technical Direction
- Team Leadership
- Mentoring
- Roadmapping
- Hiring
- Agile Facilitation
- Vendor & Delivery Management
How I work
I open a wide range of options so there’s something real to choose from, then focus on what’s viable. A client asks for one thing and I give three. I work fluently in English and async, with US-timezone overlap, after 16 years on US Eastern teams. Remote, self-directed, and comfortable operating without a settled playbook.