Rodrigo Castro, Software Engineer, Dublin.

Machine Learning Engineer and Software Architect. Consultant specialized in Computer Vision.

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Check out my work and projects to learn about what I do.

NewsWhip — Dublin, Ireland

- Director of Software Engineering — 2013 - 2016

- Software Engineer — 2 months, 2013

- Software Engineer Intern — 6 months, 2012

NewsWhip is on a mission to scan the entire world’s digital content, tracking the flow of these millions of objects across all major social networks in real time – giving comprehensive up-to-the-minute data on what’s engaging all audiences across the globe.

NewsWhip delivers the first signal of trending content and provides an unrivaled historical view of performance trends for publishers, authors, trends and topics through its products: Spike, Analytics, API, Syndication.

During my almost 4 years at NewsWhip I helped define and shape a tiny company of 2 employees ( Tom Lowe and myself) and 2 founders (Paul Quigley and Andrew Mullaney) to a team of 50 highly talented and motivated people. Thanks to our attention to detail, our quality-always-first approach and our sound technical foundations, we saw NewsWhip grow exponentially from 0 dollars in annual recurring revenue to a multimillion dollar company. All, whilst making of NewsWhip a great place to work through our culture & values.

My roles and responsibilities varied over the course of the years. I went, together with with Paul & Andrew, from trying to figure out which markets we wanted to be in. Is it B2C or B2B? To architecting and rearchitecting, to building, tuning, and rebuilding the backend, building the front-end, setting up human & machine processes, databases, servers, monitoring, weekend hot-fixing, post-mortems and all devops related tasks. I performed data and database modelling, code structuring and guidelines, setting up best-practices, choosing the technology stack, training, hiring and a thousand other things you would expect from a few motivated people in a small company.

Over time, as we hired more people, I focused my attention on scaling our products and empowering the engineers & developers in our teams, making sure our problems were well understood and that our solutions were technically sound. Simultaneously, I would make sure the Engineering teams were always knowledgeable, efficient and that everyone enjoyed their day to day.

Java Scala JavaScript HTML CSS Playframework Maven SBT Git

Ubuntu Puppet AWS EC2 RDS CloudFront S3 IAM VPC Route53

MySQL Elasticsearch Cassandra Kafka Zookeeper Redis

jQuery AngularJS

Agile

NewsWhip Spike

Amadeus — Nice, France

- Software Engineer Intern — 4 months, 2012

Amadeus acts as an international network providing comprehensive real-time search, pricing, booking, ticketing and other processing solutions to travel providers and travel agencies.

Code is written by humans for humans to read. It is therefore natural that code reviews are and should be one of the first ports of call for ensuring Software Quality. During my internship at Amadeus, code reviews were very much manual and laborious. That's where I jumped in to understand the needs of the department and build an assist tool to help Amadeus' engineers write better software.

After several interviews with different engineers and managers, I settled for a web interface that mixed their current tooling: Java, GWT and CVS. Then added Review Board to the mix for the actual code reviews.

I was excited to see everyone in the organization got really involved and my work sparked the conversation on how to improve this important process.

Java HTML CSS SQL Ebean ORM JDBC Review Board Flyway Guice Eclipse Git Agile methods

Atos Worldline — Lyon, France

- Software Engineer Intern — 2 months, 2012

Worldline is the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, delivering new-generation services that enable its customers to offer smooth and innovative solutions to end consumers.

Alexis Lecanu and I built a prototype proof-of-concept of an Android mobile application, that lets users visualize a catalogue of cars through an augmented reality interface. We thoroughly documented our technical choices and architecture so future developers could build upon our work.

We were part of a larger team building an integrated, on-demand car rental solution. Our project management was scrum.

Java C++ SWIG Vuforia SDK Android NDK Maven Mercurial Eclipse Scrum

Augmented Reality car catalogue

2017 - 2017: Practical Deep Learning for Coders, Part 1 by Jeremy Howard, Fast.ai.
2015 - 2015: Machine Learning by Stanford University, Coursera. Final Grade: 99.2%.
2013 – 2013: Functional Programming Principles in Scala by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Coursera. Final Grade: 97.5%.

2012 – 2013: Computer Science student at Trinity College Dublin. Academic exchange, Ireland.
2008 – 2013: Combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Engineering, INSA de Lyon, France.
2010 – 2013: Specialization in Computer Science at INSA de Lyon, France.
2008 – 2010: Preparatory cycle: Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics at INSA de Lyon, International Section, France.
2005 – 2008: Combined Upper-Secondary Education and technical degree in Digital Systems, CECyT 9, IPN. Mexico.