Alejandro V

Director of Engineering

Mar 2025 - Present • 1 yr 6 mos

– Lead all engineering (software, systems, and electrical), owning architecture, roadmap, hiring, and delivery for Iridia’s first integrated hardware–cloud platform, while staying hands-on in system design, code review, and production troubleshooting. – Shipped molecular cryptography in 2025, an anti-counterfeiting capability that harnesses the high-entropy nature of molecular binding to create tamper-proof “molecular fingerprints,” proving product authenticity and enabling end-to-end traceability. – Pioneered an AI-assisted, developer-in-the-loop delivery model across IaC, API, and frontend work, lifting feature throughput 50% per 8-week release cycle and roughly doubling per-engineer output while holding headcount flat. – Coach and develop engineers through weekly 1:1s, written growth plans, and direct feedback; carried the team through a. fundamental change in operating model with zero regretted attrition, holding quality and cohesion steady with demos, retros, and design reviews. – Own the engineering roadmap and release train, partnering with executive, product, and go-to-market leaders to sequence delivery against company strategy and customer commitments and make explicit trade-offs on scope, quality, and date. – Drove NIST 800-171 compliance to qualify Iridia for a $3–$5M Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) award integrating molecular cryptography into the defense supply chain; now leading SOC 2 (Q1 2027 audit) and ISO 27001 to open enterprise and government markets. – Integrated the automated data-writing instrument with cloud services so customer orders placed in a central web portal execute end to end without manual handoff, the step that turned a lab process into a sellable product. – Serve as technical lead in customer engagements across memorabilia, supply chain, high-value freight security, and premium spirits, running discovery and integration scoping that converted early pilots into paying account

Associate Director of Platform Engineering

Mar 2023 - Mar 2025 • 2 yrs

- Directed an 8-person cross-functional team (5 software engineers plus mechanical, systems, and electrical), setting technical direction across all four disciplines to automate Iridia’s molecular data-writing protocol end to end. – Grew engineering from 2 to 8: designed a structured, values-based interview loop, built the onboarding program, and hired across software, systems, and electrical while establishing the 1:1, demo, and retro cadence the team still runs on. – Scaled the technology from a manual lab-bench process into a fully automated robotic system, raising data-writing throughput from bits per day to megabytes per day and opening the platform to multiple commercial markets. – Architected the AWS event-driven platform bridging the DNA-writing instrument and the cloud: containerized services on ECS (images via ECR) with target-tracking auto-scaling to absorb demand spikes, and durable message queues guaranteeing zero data loss across long-running, non-repeatable hardware runs. – Reduced operation to a single manual step (scientists supply the proprietary chemical solution and receive a substrate with fully encoded molecules) on a highly available, secure, cloud-connected platform

Staff Software Engineer

Mar 2022 - Mar 2023 • 1 yr

– Founding software engineering hire: designed and implemented Iridia’s core encoding/decoding algorithms and delivered the first proof-of-concept storing digital data on synthetic molecules and retrieving it via Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). – Achieved a data density of 15 bytes per nucleic-acid strand with built-in forward error correction tolerant of write and NGS read errors. – Established the foundational software architecture and Git branch-based CI/CD pipelines aligned to the SDLC, the delivery backbone the team still scales on.