Barcelona · Backend engineer
Hi, I'm Julio. I build the half of the game nobody sees.
Twenty years writing backends. These days, the online services behind a live AAA shooter - the accounts, the logins, the data underneath. When it works, nobody notices. That's the job.
Started in Caracas in 2006, worked my way through Madrid, landed in Barcelona. Eight stops, one language - C# - and a stubborn habit of going back to school at night. I make small games on the weekend and I'm slowly writing down what twenty years taught me.
The long run
Twenty years, one stop at a time
Not a straight line, and not supposed to be. Every stop taught me something the next one needed.
.NET Software Developer
WAU · Caracas, VenezuelaSix years selling mobile content: carrier integrations, WAP and web apps, and the reporting that proved the subscription numbers were real. First lesson of my career - a system is only as reliable as the integration you don't control.
Senior Software Engineer
Mahisoft · Venezuela / MadridThe years I crossed the Atlantic. DocuSign e-signature into ChannelSoft's CMS, and listings work for Homesearch and Ten-x. Two continents in the same standup, which teaches you to write things down.
Senior Solutions Developer
Quodem · MadridA WPF point-of-sale so pharmacists could build their own promotions, and a conferencing platform for doctors running medical congresses. Two domains I knew nothing about, which is the fastest way to learn to ask better questions.
MSc, Video Game Development with Unity 3D
CICE · MadridEvenings and weekends, learning the craft I'd only ever served from the backend. Unity stuck and never left.
Senior Backend Developer
NIIT Technologies · MadridA trips importer for seasonal travel content, and drag-and-drop page modules in Sitecore so content managers stopped filing a ticket every time they wanted to move a block.
Senior Backend Engineer, then Mobile Developer
Cognizant · MadridTech lead representative for the Madrid backend team on a used-car-lease microservice, then a Xamarin app that let dairy farmers check production across their sites. Different worlds, same DDD habits.
Senior Backend Engineer, Online Services
Ubisoft · BarcelonaThree chapters in five years: an early Ubisoft Connect initiative that never reached production, the Rainbow Six Siege reputation system backend on AWS, and for the last two the Account team - user profiles, authentication, TFA, passkeys, SSO, and account linking with Steam and Blacknut. I don't carry a lead title; I carry the POCs, the spikes and the ADRs.
Novrix Labs
My own thing · OkmayaWhere I build games and tools nobody asked for, which is exactly why they're fun. I model and texture a fair amount of it myself - the art lives on ArtStation and Sketchfab, the builds on itch.io. Knowing how the asset was made changes how you argue about what the backend should carry.
What I'm actually good at
Four things I get called for
Not a list of logos. These are the problems people put on my desk.
Keeping strangers out
Authentication that has to be right every single time, for everyone, forever. I've done the whole passkey ceremony end to end and read the spec when the tutorials disagreed.
Choosing where data lives
Access patterns before schemas. Key-value or relational on the merits, hybrid when the honest answer is both, and migrations that finish without a maintenance window.
Putting out the fire
Deploys, rollbacks, and knowing which one to reach for at 3am. Reading logs at volume until the story makes sense, then writing down what happened so it doesn't happen twice.
Building the thing itself
I make small games on my own time. It's why I understand what the backend is actually holding up - and why I argue about latency budgets like they're personal.
Writing
Notes from the server room
Whatever I've been chewing on. Mostly .NET and distributed systems, sometimes games, occasionally neither.
Passkeys in C#: the whole WebAuthn ceremony, end to end
What the challenge actually protects, what you store, and the three places the tutorials and the spec disagree.
Choosing a database you can still live with in three years
Access patterns first. Picking between key-value and relational without the religion.
Post title goes here
One line on what it's about.