About me
I'm Martin, a Data Engineer at Caylent. I build cloud infrastructure and data systems on AWS. I'm based in Monterrey, Mexico. Spanish is my native language, and I'm fully proficient in English.
What I believe
Technology is one of the most powerful forces humanity has ever created. It has reduced disease, scarcity, and war. But power without direction is dangerous, and not all progress is equal. I believe the most important question in engineering is not "can we build this?" but "should we, and for whom?"
I care about animal welfare. Factory farming is one of the largest sources of suffering on the planet and it scaled with technology, not despite it. I care about the responsible development of AI, a technology powerful enough to reshape civilization and one that deserves careful, honest thinking about alignment and values. I care about open data and civic infrastructure, especially in Mexico where public data is abundant but inaccessible.
I believe the people who build things have a responsibility to think about what those things do in the world. Not just whether they work. Whether they help.
How I think
I think in tradeoffs. There's rarely an absolute best option in engineering, only the right option for this context, these constraints, this team. I care about understanding why a solution works, not just how to implement it.
I believe in breaking problems into smaller parts, thinking in diagrams, and always delivering something. If a task isn't practical yet, I build a document. If I don't know something, I go learn it. My approach is: roadmaps, checklists, requirements. Then iterate.
I'm deeply influenced by Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications and the philosophy that real engineering is about grabbing existing blocks and snapping them together to create something new. The superpower isn't genius. It's iteration. I also believe that form and function are inseparable: a well-designed system is easier to understand, maintain, and trust.
What I do
My work lives at the intersection of data engineering and cloud architecture. I've worked on data warehouse migrations, OpenSearch implementations, Kubernetes-based data platforms, and analytics layers. I build data pipelines, design architectures, validate production systems, and help teams solve problems across the AWS ecosystem.
Beyond work
I'm a deeply curious person. I fall into rabbit holes about geography, history, the universe, human inventions, and whatever mystery caught my attention this week. I love cinema and film theory, music that carries meaning, art, and architecture. I try to live by the scientific method: question your conclusions, question whether you're even asking the right question, and update when the evidence says so.
I love sports: cycling, running, soccer, and bodyweight training. I care about optimal health and longevity: whole foods, sunlight, movement, and the belief that disease, suffering, and aging are problems humanity can solve with enough collective will and technology. I care about mental health, continuous learning, and the effort of trying to leave things better than I found them.
This site
This website is deployed on AWS using S3, CloudFront, ACM, and Route 53, all managed with Terraform and deployed via GitHub Actions with OIDC authentication. No long-lived keys, no manual deploys, zero-trust CI/CD. The whole thing costs about $0.51/month.