I lead engineering teams, automate the hard parts, and build systems that scale.
I'm Santiago Molina, a full-stack engineer and tech lead based in Medellín, Colombia. Over the last 12+ years I've shipped products across commerce, SaaS, gaming, and real estate — working across the entire stack from architecture and backend services to CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling.
Right now my focus is on teams and systems: how to structure engineering organizations so they stay fast to ship, easy to maintain, and hard to break. I care deeply about developer experience — not as a buzzword, but as the measurable gap between a team that ships with confidence and one that ships with anxiety. Automation is usually how you close that gap.
I've led cross-functional teams of up to 14 people spanning product, design, frontend, and backend. I believe the most valuable thing a tech lead does is reduce the number of decisions engineers have to make under pressure — through clear standards, good tooling, and systems that fail loudly instead of silently.
Outside work I co-organize ReactJS Colombia, write about engineering workflows and DX, and find the intersection between good software and good products. When I'm not at a keyboard I'm probably reading, hiking, or watching something with a good score on Letterboxd.
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What I believe about engineering.
A few things that shape how I work, how I lead, and what I focus on.
Automate the friction, not the thinking
The best automation removes toil — repetitive, low-judgment work that slows teams down. It should never replace the thinking that makes products worth building.
DX is UX for your team
The developer experience of a codebase shapes how fast and confidently the team can move. Bad DX compounds. Good DX compounds too — invest early and measure it.
Leadership means fewer decisions under pressure
A good tech lead reduces ambiguity before it becomes risk. Clear standards, good tooling, and systems that fail loudly are how you protect a team's velocity at scale.
Performance is a product decision
Speed isn't a tech concern, it's a user concern. Every kilobyte and every render-blocking resource is a choice that affects real people on real connections.
Boring tech is often the right call
The goal is to solve the problem, not to use the newest tool. Stable, well-understood solutions let the team focus on the actual product.
Consistency beats perfection
A consistent codebase with some imperfections beats an inconsistent one with pockets of brilliance. Conventions compound. Exceptions cost.