# Fernando González Cortés Bétera, Spain fergonco@gmail.com Public profile: https://hire-me.fergonco.org/cv.md GitHub: https://github.com/fergonco Toptal: https://www.toptal.com/resume/fernando-gonzalez-cortes Blog: https://fergonco.org/blog.html ## Profile summary Backend/platform engineer working with Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and production systems with large data. Experience with production troubleshooting, geospatial pipelines, asynchronous processing, performance work, and automation from investigation to rollout. ## Engineering style - Own problems from investigation to rollout and verification - Debug using logs, SQL, metrics, traces, and direct experiments - Automate repeated operational work with Bash and small tools - Comfortable operating services in QA and production Kubernetes environments ## Recent relevant experience ### Software Engineer - xarvio / BASF Digital Farming (January 2024 - Current) - Owned Java and Spring Boot backend services for an agricultural data platform running on Kubernetes in QA and production. - Investigated production data-processing issues across RabbitMQ queues, PostgreSQL state, Kubernetes pods, and service logs, including queue saturation, retries, stuck jobs, and failed reprocessing paths. - Reduced one geospatial harvest-processing path from **3h20 to 27min** on a 190 MB production dataset by running optimization loops and releasing the selected changes to QA and production. - Produced benchmark results showing up to **~85x speedup** for expensive geospatial map processing paths, then opened and advanced production-ready PRs for the selected approach. - Isolated a resource-intensive harvest-season processing path into a dedicated deployment so heavy workloads did not affect normal service behavior during peak season. - Cut live memory requirements by about **2.3x** in one large-file processing path by replacing a WEKA-based kNN approach with a custom k-d tree design. - Validated geospatial output correctness by comparing intermediate and persisted results across sanitize, persist, and shapefile round-trip steps, so performance changes did not change business outputs. - Released and verified backend services through QA and production Kubernetes environments, checking deployed versions, rollout state, and compatibility with other services. ### DevOps Engineer - Scaleway (January 2023 - December 2023) - Worked on control-plane and backend components for a serverless PostgreSQL product built from an early stage. - Built prototypes and product functionality in a small engineering team, including workflow, provisioning, backup, and reliability-related platform behavior. - Investigated connection scaling, authentication, pause/resume, and health-check issues across proxy, bouncer, and control-plane components under realistic load. - Added FerretDB compatibility support for MongoDB-like workloads. - Improved platform observability and resilience by debugging Temporal workflows, IAM failures, CI/CD blockers, and memory pressure in production-like environments. ### Software Engineer III - Juni Technology AB (April 2022 - December 2022) - Developed backend components in Golang and PostgreSQL within a microservice architecture using Kafka and gRPC for service communication. - Investigated onboarding, identity, and workflow failures across backend services, database state, and messaging systems, using direct SQL, logs, and reproducible test scenarios. - Worked with Helm and Kubernetes for deployment, Datadog for monitoring, and GitLab CI/CD for delivery. ### Freelance (November 2021 - March 2022) - Built Java clients for cryptocurrency exchange APIs for Menai Financial Group through Toptal. - Worked on a Java/Spring/Kubernetes traffic-control system for Siemens (Yunex Traffic). ### Staff Engineer / Senior Software Engineer - Parknav (February 2019 - July 2021) - Standardized Kubernetes deployment workflows with Kustomize and internal CLI tooling, reducing release friction across backend services. - Replaced an Azure API gateway with Kong Ingress, saving about **$2,000 per month** in infrastructure cost. - Reduced infrastructure cost and memory pressure in data-intensive geospatial services through profiling, tuning, and service-level changes. - Cut the `/all-garages/` response time from about **2s to 0.7s** by optimizing backend query behavior and API output paths. - Built and operated backend and platform systems in production across Java, Go, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, geospatial services, and API gateway infrastructure. - Designed authorization for dynamically created map/data layers and fixed production authentication, routing, and deployment issues. - Built backend services and customer-facing products from scratch, including data, pricing, scaling, deployment, and operational ownership. ## Earlier experience - **Geospatial Software Engineer - FAO / United Nations (January 2013 - September 2016)** — Built and deployed geospatial publication systems for national REDD programs in Argentina, Paraguay, and Ecuador; created publication pipelines that reduced publication times by **25%** using Python, GDAL, and the GeoServer REST API. - **Freelance - Several clients (October 2016 - December 2018)** — Delivered mapping and data-processing projects using Spring, PostgreSQL, AWS, PostGIS, GeoServer, R, and Python. - **Research Engineer - IRSTV-CNRS FR2488 (April 2007 - July 2008)** — Contributed to OrbisGIS, a GIS desktop application with a SQL-engine middleware. - **Java Software Engineer - IVER T.I. (March 2002 - December 2004)** — Developed the core of gvSIG, an open-source desktop GIS application: http://www.gvsig.com/en/products/gvsig-desktop - **Freelance and product work (2005 - 2013)** — Delivered projects across Android, web mapping, image processing, spatial algorithms, and domain-specific spatial tooling. ## Selected projects and open-source work - Recruiter-facing MCP server over long-running engineering journals: https://hire-me.fergonco.org/ - Disk-based R-tree implementation: https://github.com/fergonco/rtree - GeoServer bug fix contribution: https://osgeo-org.atlassian.net/browse/GEOS-7243 ## Core technologies - Primary: Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Docker - Backend/platform: Golang, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Pub/Sub, gRPC, REST, GraphQL, Helm, Kustomize - Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana - Geospatial/data: PostGIS, GeoServer, GDAL, JTS, OSM, Mapbox - Automation: Bash, Python, MCP-based tooling ## Education - Master's degree in Software Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (2003) ## Languages - Spanish: fluent - English: fluent - French: fluent - German: fluent