Julian Ortega

Staff Engineer

• Designed Kubernetes migration architecture for a core search service of 500+ servers, building a working PoC that required zero downtime or changes to upstream systems
• Continuing development of AI-powered product features and cross-team technical leadership

Staff Engineer

• Built AI knowledge assistants targeting ~18% of all support ticket volume, with internal trial validating ~80% documentation coverage and a 30% ticket deflection target
• Led architectural redesign of the suggestion system, reducing index processing times by 64-93% and eliminating ~2 weeks of onboarding effort per customer
• Evolved conversational commerce from research to production, adopting a single-agent-with-tools architecture at 20x lower LLM cost
• Contributed to AI-powered synonym generation system achieving 93% human-level accuracy in early customer testing

Software Architect

• Founded the Software Architecture Group, establishing architectural governance and standards across the engineering organization
• Led platform standardization across acquired product lines, migrating codebases off end-of-life infrastructure and reducing tooling fragmentation inherited from multiple acquisitions
• Drove CI/CD optimization delivering 3x build speedup at lower infrastructure cost
• Standardized architecture documentation on C4 across engineering and product teams
• Drove code quality analysis adoption across 5 heterogeneous product lines inherited from multiple acquisitions, covering 2M+ lines of code
• Piloted AI code assistant tools with an initial cohort of 15 engineers across multiple teams
• Evaluated and implemented an Internal Developer Platform for systems cataloging, ownership tracking, and developer self-service
• Designed a 7-level dual-track career ladder and curated a 45-book professional development index to foster engineering growth and continuous learning

Software Architect

• Architected AI-powered semantic search adopted by enterprise retailers across fashion, sports, grocery, and DIY verticals, supporting 40+ languages
• Led technology transfer from acquired AI company, championing knowledge transfer across onboarding, troubleshooting, and new feature development
• Established coding standards, documentation standards, and NFR compliance processes co-owned across international teams
• Optimized build processes and CI/CD pipelines, reducing build times by 60%, cutting infrastructure costs by 30%, and improving deployment efficiency by 40%
• Contributed to cross-team architectural assessment identifying 12+ infrastructure optimization initiatives across compute, scaling, and containerization

Team Leader / Line Manager

• Designed and led implementation of APE (Adaptive Personalization Engine) from MVP to production, building a comprehensive microservices architecture with 6 core components across 4 major releases
• Initiated and led the search modernization project, reducing reindex times from 2+ hours to 26 minutes and improving search response from 192ms to 130ms for enterprise-scale catalogues
• Wore team lead, PM, product owner, and engineer hats on the search project for 2 years, enabling enterprise-scale catalogues that opened new customer segments
• Achieved 84% test coverage on the search microservice, exceeding the 70-80% target
• Mentored junior developers and facilitated career growth, with 70% of team members receiving promotions during tenure
• Hired engineers and contractors to scale team capabilities, including writing role specifications and conducting technical interviews

Senior Software Engineer

• Led major upgrade of internal ETL framework spanning 4 major platform versions, enabling the Data team with modern tooling and streamlining future releases
• Optimized product catalog ETL processes for 32M+ product catalogues, reducing reindexing time from 40 hours to 4 hours through data partitioning strategy and general performance improvements
• Migrated from SVN to Git for multiple projects in the business, improving team workflow and enabling modern development practices across the organization
• Created Real Time recommendations engine proof of concept integrating it into the core ecommerce product establishing foundation for production recommendation systems
• Developed ETL processes for create user profile indices to be user in personalized merchandizing
• Analytics ETL process re-architecting to offer a multi-tenant solution for multiple clients

Software Engineer

• Developed and maintained search and recommendation algorithms processing terabytes of e-commerce data
• Implemented collaborative filtering techniques that improved recommendation accuracy across multiple client implementations
• Worked on large-scale data processing systems, optimizing performance for real-time recommendation delivery
• Contributed to the development of e-commerce platform features used by major international retailers

R&D Intern

• Automated and industrialized evaluation process of recommendations, creating frameworks still used in production systems
• Generated new recommendation approaches based on collaborative filtering, contributing to patent applications
• Researched machine learning techniques for recommendation systems, bridging academic research with commercial applications
• Contributed to academic and business research projects, and technical documentation

Software Engineer

• Worked with international customers to engineer tailored .NET software solutions, managing requirements across different business domains
• Developed applications under CMMI-5 standards, gaining expertise in enterprise software development processes
• Maintained ASP.NET and C# applications for financial services clients, ensuring high availability and security standards
• Delivered high-quality software solutions for enterprise clients, consistently meeting project deadlines and quality metrics

Trainee

• Completed comprehensive .NET training program with distinction, mastering enterprise development practices
• Learned programming fundamentals and advanced .NET features through intensive hands-on training
• Studied web development methodologies and best practices used in global software delivery
• Gained international software development experience and cross-cultural collaboration skills

Research Assistant

• Contributed to nationwide research project for mobile and web platforms, collaborating with universities and industry partners
• Developed social traffic system for mobile devices and news on-demand service, pioneering early mobile application development
• Created citizen query service for government data access, improving transparency and citizen engagement
• Implemented solutions using multiple programming languages and frameworks, demonstrating technical versatility
• Collaborated with academic and business stakeholders on innovative projects that bridged research and practical application

Software engineering intern

• Led team of 2 software engineers in creating documentation standards that improved knowledge sharing across 50+ person development organization
• Developed requirements for document use cases and compliance processes, ensuring adherence to banking regulations
• Performed monthly audits to system analysts ensuring COBIT compliance, maintaining high standards for IT governance
• Collaborated with engineering teams on MediaWiki knowledge sharing platform, facilitating cross-team collaboration
• Contributed to software development processes and best practices that became standard across the engineering organization

English Teacher

• Designed and delivered interactive English curriculum for university students
• Developed engaging lesson plans using cognitive and socio-emotional approaches, adapting to diverse learning styles
• Facilitated effective and investigative learning processes, encouraging critical thinking and cross-cultural communication
• Improved students' language proficiency through innovative teaching methodologies that emphasized practical application
• Enhanced cross-cultural communication skills and international perspective through diverse student interactions

Search Infrastructure Modernization for Auto-Scaling

• Evaluated 3 architectural options with full technical investigations, recommending an event-driven approach that required zero changes to existing ETL or orchestration systems
• Built working PoC and demonstrated it at the cross-team initiative kickoff, receiving positive reception from engineering and platform teams
• Designed event-driven index distribution and cache persistence strategies preserving service performance across pod restarts and scaling events
• Established staggered rollout plan with phased service migration targeting production readiness by mid-2026
• Created all work items and led cross-team delivery, coordinating with 2-3 cloud engineers per initiative

AI-Powered Knowledge Assistants for Merchandising & Support

• Targeted the largest addressable support category (~18% of all ticket volume), reducing resolution friction for the most common how-to questions
• Internal trial validated ~80% documentation coverage for real customer questions, earning positive feedback from the support team
• Designed for measurable ticket deflection with a 30% reduction target, directly reducing average resolution times of 20+ days
• Processed and embedded ~900 knowledge base pages and anonymized customer tickets into the retrieval pipeline
• Contributed to identifying a significant customer upsell opportunity through demonstrated product value

Search Suggestions System Redesign

• Reduced index processing times by 64-93% across customer deployments (e.g. from ~7.5 hours to ~30 minutes for large catalogues)
• Eliminated ~2 weeks of onboarding effort per customer by removing separate configuration for product suggestions
• Reduced professional services tuning from days to minutes through self-service real-time configuration
• Improved suggestion relevance by 15-18% in customer quality testing
• Removed dedicated ETL pipeline, reducing hosting costs and operational complexity
• Rolled out to 10+ enterprise e-commerce customers through structured beta program with side-by-side comparison tooling
• Expanded platform capabilities positioned as a key differentiator for customer retention and growth

Conversational Commerce Platform

• Self-initiated from research through PoC to production deployment, providing a narrative and live demo that supported new prospect engagement and strengthened existing customer conversations
• Evolved architecture from modular intent routing to a single-agent-with-tools pattern using templated prompts with emotional tone adaptation, later validated as the approach adopted by leading AI providers
• Evaluated LLM providers and reached a 20x lower cost than the initial vendor, with gains in intelligence, tool use, and speed
• Built tools and infrastructure to allow agents to do reasoning using customer's search and merchandising engines
• Drove team implementation and delivery to production while coordinating across product, sales, and customer success stakeholders

The Well-Rounded Engineer: Knowledge Curation Initiative

• Curated 45 books with detailed summaries and relevance analysis, spanning technical leadership, personal development, stakeholder management, and career advancement
• Organized content across 4 development paths (management track, technical leadership, team collaboration, business context) with multiple category views
• Published as a living internal resource with engagement tracking and a supporting Slack community channel

Engineering Career Ladder Framework

• Designed 7-level dual-track career ladder (IC and management paths) with detailed competency matrices, responsibility frameworks, and promotion criteria for each level
• Created 14 detailed role specifications from Junior Software Engineer through CTO, each with SFIA-mapped competencies
• Created IC advancement path through Tech Lead, Staff Engineer, and Principal Engineer, giving technical talent a growth track without requiring management transition

AI-Powered Semantic Search Platform

• Adopted by enterprise retailers across fashion, sports, grocery, and DIY verticals, supporting 40+ languages
• Led vector search scaling investigation across 4 backends, identifying the cost-viable architecture for enterprise-scale catalogues
• Architected dual delivery model: standalone hybrid search engine and AI Search plugin for the existing platform using shared embedding technology
• Handled 100x traffic spikes through autoscaling architecture validated during production incidents
• Established engineering standards and knowledge transfer processes across the XO Search and AI teams

Search Modernization Project

• Reduced search reindex times from 2+ hours to 26 minutes across three release iterations, with a 10x improvement over the initial MVP
• Achieved 99.8% of queries under 200ms for mid-size catalogues, matching or exceeding the existing system
• Improved average search response from 192ms to 130ms on the platform's most demanding deployment
• Enabled enterprise catalogues with millions of items, opening customer segments previously beyond platform capacity
• Delivered 84% test coverage across unit and integration tests, exceeding the 70-80% target
• Architected hot-swap reindex strategy enabling zero-downtime index updates via Elasticsearch alias rotation
• Built the technical foundation and team that subsequently delivered the next-generation search platform

Adaptive Personalization Engine

• Created the original proof of concept and evolved it to production across 4 major releases over 2.5 years
• Built microservices architecture with 6 core components processing real-time user activity streams at 200+ events/second
• Maintained search response time impact under 50ms average while delivering personalized recommendations
• Coordinated cross-functional delivery across 8+ stakeholder teams including operations, infrastructure, QA, sales, and professional services
• Pioneered adoption of containerized microservices and cloud-native orchestration across the organization

Master's in Computer Science (AI Specialization)

B.S. in Systems Engineering

Amateur Theater Actor

• Prepared for multiple roles across a full production season
• Performed for live audiences in English as a second language