ES

Associate Director of Engineering · Costa Rica

Roberto Sequeira

Sixteen years building software, and now the team that builds it.

About

Sixteen years and counting.

I started coding in 2009. The first decade was at an outsourcing company, which gave me early, broad exposure across clients, stacks, and industries. C#, Ruby, Rails, Angular; insurance, nonprofit tech, enterprise software. Few things develop technical range faster than being dropped into a new domain and asked to deliver.

In 2021 I joined a product company, and that accumulated experience started paying dividends. With more ownership came the chance to introduce tools and practices the team hadn't encountered: contributions that shaped a full frontend rewrite from Ember to React. A decade of adapting across domains builds something; having the room to apply it is when it compounds. Not a one-person effort, but proposing things and seeing them land is a different kind of satisfaction.

Today I'm Associate Director of Engineering and tech lead, with three direct reports and a team working on a product built around AI agents. Still writing code, still learning.

Now

AI agents, in practice.

These days my work centers on AI agents and multi-agent systems — less theory, more building things and seeing what breaks. It's the most honest way I know to understand a new technology.

Alongside it is the part with no framework or release cycle: leadership, communication, helping a team grow. The longer I'm in the role, the clearer it is that you never quite finish learning it.

Other work

Long-running commitments.

In 2018 I built a Rails app for an independent client and shipped it fast, at the top of my game with the stack. The project went dormant, came back as its own company. The platform had multiple components and other developers owned integrations with external systems, but I was the sole person on the Rails core and its infrastructure end-to-end. The company has since grown the team. One of the most complete end-to-end experiences I've had.

I've also supported the web presence of Coopeldos for over a decade — a coffee cooperative near my hometown that sources from small local producers, including my family's since the early eighties. Domain renewals, email through Zoho, keeping the lights on. Some things you just don't let go.