Alicante, Spain
CET ⋅ ET ⋅ PT
Joaquín Oltra Hernández
Summary
I am a Software Engineer and Engineering Manager with more than 15 years of industry experience. As an engineer, I build thoughtful user experiences and the technical foundations behind reliable, maintainable software.
As a manager I strive to provide clear direction, trust and autonomy to my reports so that they can execute on the team and organization's objectives effectively, while developing professionally and advancing their careers.
Work experience
Routine (YC W21)
Staff Software Engineer, Frontend
2024 - 2026
Remote. Engineer on a small startup team building a web and desktop productivity and personal knowledge-management application with calendar, tasks, notes, and AI capabilities. Worked across Vue, TypeScript, Electron, ProseMirror, SASS, and OCaml.
- Developed a Streamable HTTP MCP server connecting the Routine application to AI clients, and upgraded it to the stateless v2 protocol.
- Built a block-based rich-text editor on ProseMirror, supporting draggable and selectable blocks, custom content types such as tasks, embeds, inline references, and callouts, plus undo/redo, document synchronization, and custom commands.
- Built a comprehensive Playwright-based framework for browser and visual-regression testing, with test coverage for user flows and QA tests, instructions for developers and agents, and continuous-integration checks.
- Improved TypeScript type safety, replacing unsafe type assertions with strong types, runtime validation, and explicit parsing at system boundaries across the application.
- Expanded core product workflows by improving editor references and search, graph and canvas interactions, AI assistant and agent automation flows, task management, and AI conversation UX.
- Improved desktop reliability by adding Sentry error reporting, fixing source-map uploads, and improving macOS packaging and signing.
- Modernized the frontend and desktop toolchain by migrating from Vue CLI to Vite and ESM while updating testing, Electron builds, and SASS and resolving hundreds of TypeScript errors.
Vendr (YC S19)
Staff Software Engineer, Frontend
2023 - 2024
Remote. Working in the Activation team as frontend engineer building user interfaces and experiences with Elm, JS and CSS for improving the onboarding experience for new users.
- Authored technical plans for product goals defining API contracts and team tasks.
- Overhauled main navigation to be collapsible and mobile-friendly with smooth animations.
- Developed a user-friendly, step-by-step account setup and onboarding process.
- Built an onboarding guide with real-time alerts to help users navigate the product.
- Implemented a tiered trial system to regulate feature access for free users, incorporating role-based restrictions and organization-specific content visibility.
- Developed a Buyer Guides feature, complete with pricing tables and visual aids, to assist users in the negotiation and software purchasing process.
- Designed key UI components, like dropdowns, modals, and a custom data visualization chart.
- Added subtle UI animations to improve navigation feedback and perceived responsiveness.
- Identified and removed large amounts of unused code, improving maintainability and performance.
Wikimedia Foundation
2014 - 2023
Staff Software Engineer, Tech lead 2021 - 2023
Remote. Working in the Trust and Safety Tools team as the tech lead and software engineer.
- Defined project scope, performed technical feasibility research and worked with product manager, designer, and other stakeholders on defining and detailing the project into actionable technical work to be executed by the team for major projects like the Safety Survey and Private Incident Reporting System
- Led setup of team kanban processes and norms collaboratively and codified the norms and processes in our tools and documentation
- Onboarded and guided several engineers on the team into the company and projects
- Developed several features for MediaWiki's QuickSurveys extension and trained engineers on deployment procedures for configuring, enabling and disabling surveys
Staff Developer Advocate 2020 - 2021
Remote. Working in the Developer Advocacy team in support of the Cloud Services team and tool developer community.
- Designed and conducted the 2020 Coolest Tool Award online event jointly with community members, coordinating the event committee, and helping produce and run the event
- Conducted, analyzed and published the Cloud Services Annual Survey 2019 and 2020, to understand our technical users and inform the teams' annual planning processes
- Analyzed research, and produced a prioritized list of communities for outreach based on data, and run an outreach workshop about bot development with Python
- Supported the Cloud Services teams projects, like deploying a new cluster of databases to replace the existing one, by providing technical documentation and code examples, and communicating and supporting the communities through the process
Software Engineering Manager 2018 - 2020
Details
Remote. Manager of the Wikimedia Product Infrastructure team.
- Built REST APIs used by the native apps teams and the web teams serving 1.5 billion unique devices serving 2 billion requests monthly
- Maintained a variety of backend components providing features such as reading lists, PDF rendering, and the Wikipedia Maps infrastructure
- Planned and resourced an effort to provide better data engineering tools and libraries for all product teams in the product department
I set team direction and annual and quarterly goals, hired and managed engineers to further Wikimedia's objectives, giving them space and trust to work effectively in a complex collaborative remote environment.
Senior Software Engineer 2016 - 2018
Details
Remote. Worked on the Mobile Web team doing JavaScript, CSS and MediaWiki PHP programming for the mobile Wikipedia websites which powers the user experience of ~60% of Wikipedia's traffic (9.5 billion monthly pageviews on 1.5 billion monthly unique devices).
Produced performance research and analysis of the content and website loading which informed several high impact projects, like lazy loading images and references.
Worked on Page previews ( 1 ), providing link previews for Desktop Wikipedia improving the reading experience for 1.5 billion unique devices serving 2 billion requests monthly.
Led and planned technical improvement projects to reduce debt and modernize the codebase while working on Product's goals.
Software Engineer 2014 - 2016
Details
Remote. Worked on the Mobile Web team doing JavaScript, CSS and MediaWiki PHP programming for the mobile Wikipedia websites which powers the user experience of ~60% of Wikipedia's traffic (9.5 billion monthly pageviews on 1.5 billion monthly unique devices).
Built several additional projects including a Survey feature for MediaWiki, public and private reading lists.
Participated in a generative research project on emergent countries quickly building several prototypes to test ideas out with users, and participating in the interview process and information analysis.
Freelance
Software Engineer, Web Developer
2013 - 2014
Details
Remote. Freelance contracting for different clients. JavaScript, HTML & CSS, data visualizations dashboard with D3, web applications.
- Data visualizations dashboard with D3
- JS web applications
- React.js for the view layer
- Browser applications using npm & browserify
- Immutable data structures (via mori.js)
- JS web application architecture & structure
- Node.js backend APIs
- Promises A+ for async (via bluebird.js)
OHIM
Senior Software Engineer
2010 - 2013
Details
Built a frontend team and worked on OHIM eSearch (JS web application) and the new OHIM Website (public site and suite of web tools).
eSearch
Search engine for OHIM, I was involved in creating the single page application using JavaScript, CSS3 with LESS, Backbone. This application got to about 25KLOC of code.
New OHIM website and suite of tools
New site and group of web tools, full redesign and layout using semantic HTML and modern CSS3 while maintaining graceful degradation and implementing responsive design. Implemented a wiki and style guide with live components and docs and different themes with a corporate framework to be used as a base in the site and tools.
Activities and responsibilities
- JavaScript development (JS with Backbone)
- Interface and interactions design (mockups, design)
- Web design
- Front end development. Creation of web applications (CSS3, HTML5, JS)
- Cross browser layouts and styles.
- Training (web technologies)
- Standardization (style guide, wiki with components and company theme)
- Web dev structure and process setup
- Help with Java w/ Spring development.
CESSER
Software Engineer, Web Developer
2010 - 2010
Details
Worked on styles, layouts, themes and JS plugins for client websites that used Drupal (MySQL, PHP).
- CSS
- JS, jQuery, and jQuery plugins
- HTML and PHP templates
University of Alicante
Software Engineer, Web Developer
2008 - 2010
Details
Design and development of a browser application to create, layout and fill magazines, and generating a print version of them in PDF.
- Web design and interaction
- Frontend
- JS, jQuery
- CSS
- HTML
- Backend
- JSP
- MySQL with JDBC
- Ops
- Linux servers
- Firefox CLI for rendering PDFs
Support for the teaching staff of a masters course, development and maintenance of the website.
Diario Informacion / Newspaper
Systems Administrator
2006 - 2008
Details
Windows, Linux and OS X user machines and servers, network infrastructure and customer support (editors and journalists).
Education
University of Alicante
Computer Science MSc (Ingeniero Superior Informática)
2003 - 2009
Languages
Spanish
Native speaker
English
Proficient (C1)
CAE (Certificate in Advanced English)
FCE
Excellent oral and written English and conversational skills
FCE
Excellent oral and written English and conversational skills
Additional information
Available to travel, could consider relocation.
I enjoy computer generated art, compilers and programming languages, UI design and development, and exploring new technologies that grow the way we think about solving problems.