Engineering manager at Venus Labs
Engineering Manager at Venus Protocol, the #1 decentralized blockchain lending protocol on BNB Chain (also available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and opBNB). With more than $2B deposited and over 78 security audits performed in 18 months, we prioritize security.
I have been working in the blockchain industry since 2018 in various technical roles, including individual contributor, team lead, CTO, and engineering manager.
I hold an Executive MBA from IESE Business School (Spain, 2014), a MSc in Computer Science from Carlos III University (Spain, 2007), and Bachelor in Computer Science and Engineering (Spain, 2005) with the best grades in my class. My main research interests lie in blockchain and distributed systems.
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My main focus at Venus Labs is to get things done in the Venus Protocol (https://venus.io). I translate business requirements into technical specifications and manage nine senior developers to achieve our goals, which include defining the architecture, specifying technical tasks, and reviewing pull requests. I also manage releases, coordinating the efforts of different teams (smart contracts, frontend, and backend developers) and overseeing security audits (more than 78 in 18 months). The Venus Labs team (5 Solidity developers, 3 full-stack developers, and 1 DevOps engineer) is in charge of developing the Venus Protocol (https://github.com/VenusProtocol), the leading lending protocol on the BNB Chain, now also available on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and opBNB, with more than $2B supplied. The team develops features agreed upon with the Venus Community (https://community.venus.io), focused on guaranteeing the security of deposited funds. From January 2023 to July 2024: * we have reduced the bad debt of the protocol from $100M to $4k * we have deployed the protocol to Ethereum, Arbitrum and opBNB (with Optimism, and other EVM's in the pipeline) * we have defined 245 VIPs (Venus Improvement Proposals, see https://github.com/VenusProtocol/vips), releasing a significant features, such as Isolated pools (a new version of the lending protocol), automatic income allocation, the Peg Stability Module for VAI, Venus Prime (a loyalty program), and Resilient price oracles * the total supply in the protocol is $2 billion (as of July 2024), highlighting the importance of security in every release. 78 audits in 18 months with external firms: OpenZeppelin, Quantstamp, Pessimistic, Peckshield, Certik, Fairyproof, Code4rena and Cantina The tech stack we use at Venus Labs is: * Solidity and hardhat, for the smart contract development (with mocha and chai for testing) * Typescript, react, wagmi and viem for the frontend development * Semantic release and github actions for CI/CD Skills: Blockchain · Ethereum · Engineering Management · People Management · Leadership · DeFi · Solidity Venus Protocol
My main focus at Virtue Poker as the CTO was coordinating the different teams (smart contracts, backend, and frontend) to develop and release the dApp on Ethereum. I translated business requirements into technical specifications, defined parts of the architecture, and collaborated with technical leads on the rest of the designs. I also coded features, primarily on the backend side, reviewed almost every pull request from the backend and analytics teams, and coordinated software releases. The Virtue Poker team (3 backend developers, 3 analytics developers, 4 frontend developers, 1 smart contracts developer) developed a P2P poker app on the blockchain (in 2018, we used a private sidechain). There were three teams: * Frontend: Developed the Electron app used by the players. * Backend/Smart Contracts: Developed the core of the game (tables, matchmaking, payments, token bridge, etc.). * Analytics/Fraud Detection: Processed blockchain events to track player activities. The most significant outcomes we achieved during this period were: * License from the Malta Gaming Authority in 2021: https://authorisation.mga.org.mt/verification.aspx?lang=EN&company=1204c7ce-2764-488b-a0c0-9eca334b1960&details=1. I led the technical aspects of the audit process, including the development of mandatory features. * 17K players registered since January 2021, with a peak of 2,800 in one day (July 29, 2021). * 3.4M hands stored in the analytics system, which I designed. * 13K suspicious interactions among players, automatically detected with the internal fraud detection system we developed. The tech stack we used at Virtue Poker included: * Solidity for smart contract development (with Jest for testing). * AWS Lambda, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, RDS, DynamoDB, EventBridge, and Elasticsearch on the backend. * React and Electron for app development. * Semantic Release, Travis, and Serverless for CI/CD. Skills: AWS Lambda · Serverless Computing · Management · Blockchain · Ethereum · Engineering Management · People Management · Leadership · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Node.js Virtue Poker
Working at Virtue Poker: using the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to build a decentralized poker platform. https://virtue.poker I was the first individual contributor to the Analytics team in Virtue Poker. This backend team was in charge of developing the needed systems to harvest, enrich and store the relevant events generated by the app players. I led the definition and build of the CI/CD pipeline used by the different backend teams (not only the Analytics team), integrating the use of the Serverless framework. I acquired a deep knowledge of the internals of this framework, publishing some plugins (i.e. https://github.com/chechu/serverless-dynamodb-fixtures). I developed an internal CLI to simplify the execution of recurring tasks (i.e. check the status of the poker tables, release a new version, launch the tests, etc.) I used listr and inquirer. We used this CLI also in the CI/CD pipeline The main achievement in this period was the release of the beta version of the game to the production environment, including the VPP ICO (https://icodrops.com/virtue-poker) Skills: Serverless · Continuous Integration (CI) · Ethereum · Serverless Framework · Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtue Gaming
Leading Acceso (+200 global staff) IT department (20 IT in-house staff), reporting to the CEO, and being a member of the corporate executive committee. • Hadoop Big Data platform. Maintenance of a low-latency, real-time, distributed Hadoop-based Big data solution (HDFS, HBase, Zookeeper) with full-text search, text mining and streaming processing capacities. Integration with several online and social media content providers. • Development of several Web (Django, PHP) platforms for real-time press, TV and radio, online news and social media monitoring and analysis services. • Implementation of BI platform based on Tableau to analyze huge volume of data, via web based dashboards with live connections to original data. • R&D Management: management of different R&D projects such as the (CENIT) research project on Social Media (http://cenitsocialmedia.es) lead by Yahoo! Research Barcelona with a 4MM € budget. • Development of several data mining solutions: machine-learning classification and clustering solutions, automatic logo and face recognition, named entities, graph analysis, automatic summaries, speech-to-text and close-caption solutions. Skills: Team Management · Engineering Management · People Management · Leadership
As product manager I decide the strategy of the main product at Acceso: the clipping; using marketing techniques and defining new features. I maintain direct contact with the Technology team, using my tech background, and at the same time, I listen to the needs of our clients and I try to satisfy them, exploiting my business knowledge. Skills: Engineering Management
Development of the administration web application for the "Centro de Documentación Teatral", an institution of the Ministry of Culture of Spain, using the framework Grails. Working in a team with 8 members. My role here was to provide my experience in the technology, increasing the quality of the final product.
Development of two web applications: - Aparcamiento: management of private car parks in the university. - Opina: management of the community feedback and integration of this feedback with the global issue tracking tool of the university. In both applications my roles were software architect (designing the infrastructures) and senior programmer (coding the solutions).
My own company, where I developed a fantasy game for the 2010 Fifa World Cup: El Juego del Mundial (currently unavailable). In the game you could buy football players with fantasy coins and you selected each day 11 players to gain points, depending of the their actions (goals, assistances, red/yellow cards, etc.) The game was developed by ourself, using Grails and several API's to provide a complete experience across integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Paypal, Mailchimp, etc. Skills: Engineering Management Team configuration screenshot
Development of the web http://madridnetwork.com, working in a group of 8 members. The site uses a custom CMS, whose development was my main task. The technology used was ASP.Net.
Development of a new web application for renting flats, focused on the university community. The framework used was grails.
Integration of avionics software in test benches. Design of new integration test platforms.
Development of Internet gaming platform in Sistemas Técnicos de Loterias. Multitier architecture with JSF, EJB and JPA as main technologies.
Development of mobile games, with J2ME technology.
The course covered Ethereum concepts, key developer tools and other aspects of smart contract and dApp development including building a front end, as well as security best practices. This course helped me learn the following skills: ✔Develop a secure full-stack Decentralized Applications (dApps) on Ethereum from scratch. ✔ Understand various design patterns and common pitfalls while developing smart contracts. ✔ Write and test Solidity smart contracts for a blockchain project. ✔ Write cohesive web3, React, Redux and Javascript dApp code. ✔Deploy a dApp to a test network. Final project: https://github.com/chechu/consensys-academy-final-project Skills: Ethereum 2018 ConsenSys Academy Developer Program Online Bootcamp Certification - Jesus Lanchas
Skills: Engineering Management
Artificial intelligence as area of specialization
Activities and societies: Linux user group Computer architecture as main specialization. Award for the best academic record in the degree.
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Working at Virtue Poker: using the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts to build a decentralized poker platform. https://virtue.poker As the technical lead of the Analytics team, I participated in the definition of the architecture from scratch, evolving it according to the needs and the new services offered by AWS. I participated in the hiring process, selecting new teammates for the project. There were 3 backend senior developers reporting to me in that team. We deployed to the production environment the full analytics pipeline, ingesting, enriching and storing every relevant event generated by the players (i.e. 270K hands). This information was externally used by the security researchers (with Jupyter) to detect fraud. As CTO (later on Virtue Poker) we included some automatic detections of fraud in the pipeline. The infrastructure was built on AWS, using Lambda as main actor to provide the service, with other common products (SQS, SNS, Kinesis, RDS, DynamoDB, Event Bridge, etc.) and Elasticsearch. Continuous integration with Travis, maintaining the definition of the infrastructure as code thanks to Serverless framework, and integrated to Kaleido as private blockchain provider. Skills: Ethereum · Engineering Management · Leadership · Fraud Detection · Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtue Poker
I was the project leader at Acceso of the Cenit Socialmedia project (http://cenitsocialmedia.es). The total project budget was 25 million Euro over a three and a half year period (2010-2013). The goal of the project was to advance the state of the art in Social Media, particularly in the areas of communications, marketing, and media, both in terms of research and industry impact.