About me

An engineer who reads.

A short story of how I ended up cleaning the foundations of data instead of painting their dashboards.

Hi, I'm Cristóbal. Data architect, analytics engineer, and AI product builder. I work from Madrid with a short list of clients at a time.

I studied engineering and ended up, almost without noticing, working on the least glamorous business problems: why two systems looking at the same thing don't agree, why a report takes forty seconds, why nobody trusts the number they're looking at.

I spent ten years in large companies — Bacardi among them — translating what business folks wanted to ask into what the data could actually answer. Independent since 2023.

Trajectory

A timeline.

2023 — today
Independent
Consulting and long-form contracts in data architecture and AI products.
2019 — 2023
Bacardi · Madrid
Data platform lead. Governance, master data, and global analytical layer.
2016 — 2019
Consulting · Madrid
Integration and BI projects across retail and banking.
2014 — 2016
Early years · Chile
Junior engineer; learned SQL by watching others fix mine.
Principles

What I believe.

01

Less is more defensible

A model with twenty well-chosen tables endures; one with two hundred gets abandoned.

02

Lineage isn't decoration

If a number can't show where it came from, it doesn't belong in an executive report.

03

Automate the boring, not the delicate

AI is a great hand for what's repetitive. Business judgment is still made by someone with a face.

04

Talk to whoever uses the data

If I don't talk to the analyst who opens the report on Mondays, I have no idea what I'm building.

Tools

What I work with.

Warehouse

Snowflake · BigQuery

When volume matters.

Transform

dbt

Standard analytical layer.

Orchestration

Airflow · Dagster

Idempotent DAGs.

Language

Python · SQL

Explore and commit.

AI

Claude · OpenAI

Agents with tests.

RAG

pgvector · Weaviate

Retrieval with telemetry.

BI

Metabase · Power BI

Auditable preference.

Version control

Git · GitHub

Everything in a repo with CI.