About

From junior engineer in Bogotá to Director of Technology in Toronto.

I have worked in software for more than 18 years, across real estate, e-commerce and fintech. I have been a full stack developer, team lead, architect, manager, CTO and director. Along the way I learned that building teams matters as much as building software.

The path

I started in 2010 as a junior engineer at Americas BPS, building C# and .NET applications for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. From there I moved into consulting at Periferia IT, where I built a payment microservice for Old Mutual that grew sales by 50% in its first year.

In 2015 I joined Fincaraiz.com.co, one of Colombia's largest real estate portals. I started as Lead Software Engineer and became CTO in 2019, leading a team of 30 through a migration from a legacy monolith to microservices, with zero downtime for more than 5 million monthly visits.

In 2022 I moved to Canada and earned a Certified Artificial Intelligence Engineer credential at Lambton College in Toronto. Since January 2024 I have been Director of Technology at Cedar Planters in Oakville, where I was the first technical hire and built the technology department, from CI/CD and security to the company's data platform.

What I believe about learning

Many people think you have to know everything before you take on the next challenge. In my experience, you learn what the job needs once you are in it and have to do it. What counts is a track record of adapting, not already knowing everything.

How I lead.

Empowerment through accountability

I set the architecture and the bar, then give senior engineers full ownership of the implementation. It grows leaders inside the team and keeps me from becoming the bottleneck.

Guided discovery

I'd rather give someone a real question and a framework than the answer. That is how a data analyst on my team found a better tool for our data pipelines and became a data engineer.

Mistakes in the open

When something goes wrong, we run a lessons-learned session, not a search for blame. People raise problems early when they know it is safe.

Data before opinions

Lead time, cycle time and say/do ratios show where work is stuck. Then I talk to the people involved before changing anything.

Adevinta Culture Awards 2019 finalist digital diploma awarded to Erwin Mongui

Recognition · 2019

Adevinta Culture Awards finalist.

Recognized while I was CTO at Fincaraiz.com.co. The Culture Awards go to the people who build trust within their teams by living Adevinta's Key Behaviours: say it like it is, win and lose together, get stuff done, and always be learning.

Education and credentials.

Bachelor of Computer Engineering, Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores, Bogotá, 2013. Certified Artificial Intelligence Engineer, Lambton College, Toronto, 2024. Co-author of Eliminating Randomness in Selecting International Passengers for RT-PCR, STEM Fellowship Big Data and AI Challenge 2023, published in the STEM Fellowship Journal. Spanish native, English proficient.

Machine learning and data

Software architecture

Fintech and agile delivery

Data, search and infrastructure