Software Engineering / San Diego

Francisco Guerra

Director of Software Engineering. I build production systems and the infrastructure they run on.

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About

I build production systems and the infrastructure they run on — full-stack, AWS, and the quiet work that keeps both honest. A lot of what I know about engineering for this industry came from also running the strategy, shipping the implementation, and designing the tests that told us whether either one worked. That kind of cross-section is harder to fake than to earn, and it shows up in how I think about the work now.

Experience

  1. 2013 – Present

    Iconic Industry

    Director of Software Engineering

    • Sole developer on the central codebase — tracking, reporting, campaign management UI, AWS infrastructure, and the deployment pipeline.
    • Architected a multi-PHP Docker hybrid that runs legacy and modern code side-by-side on the same machine, with NGINX routing between PHP versions — solved an SSL/cipher crisis that couldn't be fixed by simply upgrading.
    • Migrated the platform from on-prem to AWS, then spent the years after that making it cheaper, faster, and harder to break.

  2. 2010 – 2013

    CPC Strategy

    Director of Platform & Development

    • Built a self-serve Amazon marketplace platform from scratch — integrated with the Amazon Marketplace API for client-managed ASIN creation, listing updates, and product management.
    • Built a SKU-to-ASIN matching engine on top of the Marketplace API — surfaced candidate matches from incoming product feeds and routed them through a review queue, replacing what had been an entirely manual lookup process.

  3. 2006 – 2010

    Commission Junction

    Datafeed Manager

    • Managed paid inclusion and shopping feeds for major national accounts including Priceline and REI — single operator, lowest overhead, highest margin in the division.
    • Built a custom internal optimization platform that mirrored the CJ backend pixel-for-pixel — granular control over traffic to individual products, categories, and home pages, with my own tracking layer underneath.

  4. 2005 – 2006

    WebMetro

    Paid Inclusion Director

    • Built the agency's product feed and bidding automation system from scratch — real-time optimization across comparison shopping engines and paid inclusion, replacing third-party dependency.

  5. 2002 – 2005

    Unreal Marketing

    Paid Inclusion Director

    • Ran paid inclusion campaigns on national retail accounts including Foot Locker, Eastbay, and NFL Shop — built my own automation tooling to run them at scale.

Technical Philosophy

AI drafts, humans execute

AI is a force multiplier in the work I trust to revisit — code, tests, scaffolding, the parts where the worst case is a cleanup. Generated changes get documented, reviewed, understood, and run by me. Capability isn't the constraint. Consequence is.

Plan first, ship small and fast

Most of what looks like speed later is planning earlier. I spend real time writing the plan before I write the code — usually in markdown, often with AI as a thinking partner — and then ship changes in small chunks. I test early and test often, so revisions don't break what's already working. The discipline isn't about being careful. It's about not having to redo the work.

Trust scales with reversibility

The amount of trust I extend to any tool or process is a direct function of how easily I can undo what it does. A schema change running against production gets reviewed, scripted, and executed by hand — not because the tool can't do it, but because the worst case isn't something I can re-prompt my way out of.