About

Juan Pablo Ortiz

Senior Software Engineer with experience in DevOps and SRE, building scalable systems, mission-critical services, and cloud platforms with impact across millions of users.

Biography

Juan Pablo Ortiz, known online as @wildpasco, is a Guatemalan software engineer, entrepreneur, and technical educator based in Mexico City. He specializes in cloud architecture, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering, with a focus on scalable distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and developer tooling.

Ortiz began programming at the age of 16 and is largely self-taught, later attending Universidad Galileo in Guatemala before dropping out to pursue engineering work full-time. Over a career spanning more than 10 years, he has held engineering positions at Thomson Reuters, Audible (Amazon), Oracle, Angi, BelongHome, and Sofia Salud, where he was among the first three engineers on the team. His work has centered on AWS architecture, Kubernetes, CI/CD automation, observability, and backend modernization for systems operating at global scale.

He is the founder of SmartQuiz, an AI-powered cloud certification preparation platform available on iOS with an active subscriber base. He also co-developed AVI, an artificial intelligence accessibility project that received recognition from Microsoft and Forbes.

As a technical educator, Ortiz produces Spanish-language content on artificial intelligence, Kubernetes, and cloud engineering across YouTube and short-form platforms, reaching an audience of more than 35,000 followers. He holds the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Cloud Practitioner certifications.

Featured press

Forbes

August 4, 2016

The Avi App Gives Sight To The Blind And Was Built By A Teenager

A Forbes profile on AVI, the accessibility app Juan Pablo Ortiz co-developed to help blind and visually impaired users identify objects, read text, and better navigate everyday life.

Employment history

  1. September 2024 to present

    Mexico City, Mexico

    Works on large-scale platform modernization across AWS and Azure environments, with an emphasis on release engineering, Kubernetes adoption, observability, and production reliability for multi-environment enterprise systems.

    • Modernized Dev, QA, Sandbox, and Production AWS stacks using CloudFormation and CDK, improving deployment consistency and reducing release cycle time.
    • Migrated containerized microservices from Amazon ECS to Kubernetes EKS with Helm and Argo CD, reducing deployment lead time and enabling self-service rollouts.
    • Implemented observability with Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana, and supported backend modernization work including .NET 8 upgrades, Lambda-based workloads, and stronger SSL/TLS enforcement.
  2. July 2023 to September 2024

    Mexico City, Mexico

    Supported finance and backend engineering initiatives at Audible, connecting frontend and backend systems while improving service security, testing coverage, and operational reliability for internal workflows.

    • Extended finance tooling by integrating React interfaces with Java Spring Boot services using AWS SWF, SQS, and Lambda.
    • Replaced a bypass authorization mechanism with a secure OAuth 2.0 Java Spring client to close a critical security gap.
    • Implemented Selenium-based functional testing in AWS and participated in 30+ interview loops spanning coding, system design, and hiring evaluation.
  3. June 2022 to June 2023

    Mexico City, Mexico

    Contributed to a large migration effort from on-premise infrastructure to AWS, standardizing provisioning, deployment automation, and service containerization for a multi-phase modernization program.

    • Migrated more than 15 service repositories from Angi data centers to AWS using Terraform, cutting provisioning time and reducing manual setup.
    • Containerized legacy services with Docker and standardized machine configuration through Ansible.
    • Rewrote deployment scripts from Bash to Ansible, reducing environment drift and improving incident response during the migration.
  4. February 2022 to July 2022

    San Mateo, California (Remote)

    Focused on AWS cost optimization, database resilience, and the introduction of foundational SRE practices for a growing engineering organization.

    • Reduced AWS infrastructure costs by more than 25 percent through Cost Explorer analysis, Glacier archiving, and application resource optimization.
    • Introduced RDS read replicas and improved resilience patterns across AWS Elastic Beanstalk deployments.
    • Rolled out Datadog to EC2 infrastructure and established documentation, on-call rotation, and postmortem practices to strengthen reliability culture.
  5. January 2021 to February 2022

    Guadalajara, Mexico

    Worked on internal tooling and operational support for Oracle's global cloud support organization, with responsibilities spanning Java services, observability, Kubernetes operations, and SLA support.

    • Developed and maintained internal Java tooling, including Jira and Atlassian integrations used by global business units.
    • Monitored cluster services through Prometheus and Grafana dashboards while supporting SLAs through on-call rotations and ticket-driven operations.
    • Provisioned Oracle Container Engine environments for custom projects, including compliance and approval workflows.
  6. February 2019 to January 2021

    Mexico City, Mexico

    Joined as one of the earliest engineers and helped scale the product and engineering organization during a period of rapid growth, contributing across DevOps, mobile delivery, frontend systems, and backend product development.

    • Helped scale the engineering team from 3 to 20 developers while contributing to hiring and engineering culture.
    • Led DevOps work behind a free insurance app experience launched during COVID-19, supporting more than 2,500 weekly medical video consults across Mexico.
    • Automated Android and iOS releases with Travis CI, CircleCI, and AppCenter, and built product features with React, Redux, Apollo, GraphQL, Django, and WebRTC tooling.