About
About me
I’m Juan, a design engineer, and a dad of two. 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 designer at a US company to its first in-house engineer and then 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
Design is the part I’m strongest at. UI, UX, interaction and visual design, done by hand when precision matters. Industrial and brand design is where I come from, and it still anchors everything I make: I care as much about how a product looks, feels and reads as about whether the system underneath is sound. Design thinking first, which means understanding the problem before opening any tool.
Skills
- UI/UX Design
- Visual Design
- 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
- Postgres
- REST APIs
- Tailwind
- Vercel
- Software Architecture
AI & Agentic Systems
I build AI-natively. I direct coding agents and own the architecture, the guardrails, the evaluation and the quality bar. I design both agentic and conventional architectures, and I use AI to move at the speed of a team while the judgment stays mine.
My clearest proof of this is The Hallucination Herald, a newspaper run entirely by AI with no human in the newsroom. One autonomous agent, the Publisher, runs a real tool-use loop and decides for itself what gets covered and when to stop. Everything downstream is a deterministic pipeline of nineteen gated LLM steps, arranged as an editorial hierarchy, with fact-checking, entity and stat verification, dedup and a quality gate. One agent where the decisions are genuinely open, deterministic steps everywhere else, because that is what keeps the output reliable and the cost fixed. Knowing which of the two a problem needs is the part that took experience.
Skills
- Agent Architecture
- Orchestration
- Guardrails
- Evals & Observability
- Claude Code
- LLM APIs
- Prompt Design
- RAG
Leadership
I spent 16 years at a US company, growing from designer to its first in-house engineer and then 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.