Francisco Bustamante

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering team of Bank Reconciliation at Xero. A group of five pods/teams based on NZ and AU, with around 30 indirect reports and seven direct reports.
• Responsible for the group’s delivery and engineering practices.
• Responsible for the group's engineering culture.
• Grow, mentor and coach Engineering Managers (Team Leads)
• Team sizing and capacity planning: Making sure we have the right people and the right teams.
• Align teams to the product vision and strategic goals.
• Technical strategy to support the product strategy.
• Team up with other product leaders (Product/Design/Product Marketing/Architecture) to make sure teams are fully cross functional and all the gaps are covered.

Achievements

• Adopted SLOs to measure system stability and manage error budgets.
• Setup of the first after-hours on-call rotation for the group and introduced regular Chaos Days to better prepare teams for incidents.
• Used OKRs for alignment and outcome definition.
• Consolidated our group's Engineering Leadership Team and for the first time had our own goals (Engineering OKRs)
• Actively participated in the recruitment shared pipeline that was created and maintained by a small group of Engineering leaders and teams at Xero.

• Initially started as Senior Developer and after nine months progressed to the Development Team Lead role.
• Led a cross functional team of skilled engineers with different specialties such as Software Engineers, Data Scientist, DevOps and Quality Assurance.
• The team was part of the first Data Science and Automation group at Xero, leading customer facing Data Science and Machine Learning (ML) projects.
• Team responsible for Email-to-Bills feature which uses ML models to extract information from emailed PDFs and then creates automatic bills within Xero.

• Initially started as Senior Developer and after few months I was promoted to Tech Lead and People Lead.
• Led the team responsible for migrating all Banking components from Rackspace to AWS. More than 20 components using different technologies: Windows services, Windows Scheduled tasks, Eb APIs, etc. The migration was a Lift-and-Shift approach.
• My team planned, designed and executed all the tasks for the migration which was carried out successfully in about 4 months.
• Responsible for the technical roadmap of some of the key components of the Banking platform.
• Mentored and coached ntermediate and junior developers.

• Worked for the Digital Forensics team in a software product to automate evidence discovery in both personal computers and mobile devices.
• The main goal of the software was speed up the forensic analysis of simple cases and free up forensic specialists for more complex cases. The product was highly distributable, scalable and forensically safe.
• Developed a file access layer which abstracts access for most common file systems (FAT, NTFS, ext, HFS, etc.) in order to read and process any kind of files
• Developed a component to automatically recognise adult-content images using OpenCV (Computer Vision framework) and Machine Learning algorithm (SVM)
• Instrumental in the development and optimisation of a multi-threading processing engine in order to speed up file discovery and process large amount of data in a short period of time
• Used .NET technologies (C#, WCF and ASP.NET), SQL Server and third-party components (i.e., Aspose, 7ZIP, etc.) for development
• Instrumental in adopting agile methods in particular Scrum as Scrum Master of the team.

• Full hands-on lab which helped students to undertake a one trimester project using agile methods.

• Worked using Findur software platform (for Central Banks) in both Java and .NET. Extending the platform and integrating external services to the core banking system.

Worked for software consulting companies, as Software Developer/Engineer and Architect using several programming languages such as C#, Java and PHP