# Guillermo Alcantara > Engineer Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/guillermoalcantara I'm a developer. I'm a generalist. Bring to the table 17 years of experience packaged as a solid full stack / mobile engineer. A proven record of successful products shipped. Love working with people from different backgrounds. Finding ways to create great systems. Balancing quality, time and scope. Delivering what's needed by the business. Have developed my skills as a teacher, mentor, interviewer, manager and scrum master because developing is more than writing code; it is about people in the end. We will thrive by developing a great team that delights users with an awesome product. I love coding, making games, and enhancing tools for my peers; but what inspires me most is creating something bigger than me. Specialties: Scrum, Software Architecture, Android, Web technologies ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Kiddom Jan 2026 – Present ### Founder / CTO @ Pandora's Way Jan 2024 – Jan 2026 | San Francisco, CA ### Staff Software Engineer @ Rippling Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, CA ### Staff Software Engineer @ ASAPP Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Engineering Lead @ Kiddom Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Software Engineer @ Kiddom Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Software Engineer @ Lively Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Bay Area At Lively I had the pleasure to create a product that aided senior citizens (make the world a bit better). As one of the first engineers I had the opportunity to touch pretty much everything in the stack. Wrote the original code that integrated with our manufacturer, our warehouse, our store provider, and our email service provider. Single handedly developed their android app (after release we got another dev). Supported the effort to update the iOS app to the ios7 style. Helped improve their website in general, and added analytics in particular. I have lead the mobile effort (a sub-team of 3 including me). Technologies: Android, python, angularjs, js, Obj-C, iOS, Java, ansible, docker ### Senior Software Engineer @ Zynga Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Zynga HQ, SF Joined Zynga to learn how to scale games. It's a great company where I had the opportunity to be in several teams. My responsibilities changed from team to team but the constant was striving to be fast; knowing that your changes affected millions of people. Started in the Gamebar team as a full-stack engineer. It was an add-on for your browser where you could check your stats in the different Zynga games. Technologies: HTML5, JS, CSS, FB integration, OAuth, Hudson, PHP, Vertica DB I went to be a Devops helping Rewardville and Zynga.com handle the traffic, but beyond that helping the company by keeping Zynga's backend services alive. Technologies: Nagios, Puppet, Zookeeper, Mysql, Memcache, Membase, Redis, Akamai, Rightscale, Ruby Decided I wanted to be closer to the players, I got Petville. A small invest and express game that was in maintenance mode. I kept their metrics alive. Cut in half the costs of operation. Kept it running. Technologies: Everything needed by the game from Flash to ops, you name it. Worked in another invest and express game that got cancelled. It was awesome. There my responsibilities were working with a remote studio as a full-stack developer and integrating with Zynga's services. We were using a custom game engine written in C++. Had to do bindings for the native hooks that were required. Technologies: Objective-C, C++, Java (Android) Worked in the shared code used by WithFriends games such as "Running With Friends" and "What's the phrase?" for both iOS and Android platforms. We worked hard to keep feature parity. Responsible for a performance tracker that measured CPU, Memory usage and Network transactions. Worked in reducing the memory footprint of our games. Updating FB SDK. Worked in Localizing (L10N) our framework. ### Technical Director @ Kaxan Publishers Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 Hired to lead the development of "El Chavo", the first 100% Mexican produced Wii game. Also helped with development of several iOS games. In charge of 12-24 new grads. I had to hire them, train them and set the processes they would follow. Helped the producer establishing schedules, prioritizing features and sorting the best way to communicate among the different roles we had. Helped as liaison between Kaxan and Nintendo, Sony and Apple. Designer and developer in a facebook game (http://apps.facebook.com/aeropoop/). Technologies: Lightspeed (Gamebryo), Unity3d, Mercurial, C# ### Founder - Lead Programmer @ Radical Golem Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 We started developing RIAs for clients in the USA and Canada. Our small company did several interesting projects. For instance, I developed the backend for an iOS application to share contacts (at the time called rmbrme.com) with a nice clean RESTful API. Also did a system to reserve camping spots in Alberta's parks (Canada). That used Google Maps API as the center of the UI. It was an awesome experience for my entrepreneur side. With time, we decided to move our company into the game industry. We did a facebook connected Tower Defense game. It was called ZombieChomp. It was a great experience where I learned the benefits of Memcache, sharding schemes, FB integration, paypal integration, AS3, AMF and the life-cycle of games for the web. Designed an abstraction layer (we called it Agnostic Social) to make it easy to have the option of moving the way to other social networks. We ran a tight team of 5 developers, me being the scrum master, the architect for the backend, sysadmin, devops and the full-stack guy. That's what happens when you are in a startup. Technologies: Memcache, LAMP, Rails, Rspec, FB Integration, Paypal Integration, Google Maps Integration, XLIFF, Mercurial, Sinatra, Heroku, Sqlite3, Haml, Sass, jQuery, Git ### Web Developer @ Innox - Innovacion Inteligente Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 I was hired to develop a forecasting system for small to medium retailers with a back-end in Erlang. However once inside I found a couple of places where I could be even more helpful. One of my goals was improving the engineer culture of the company. As such I became a de-facto mentor of a couple of new grads. Besides the forecast system, I became a developer involved in custom CRMs for small to medium companies. Adding small features such as designing and writing the sub-module that calculates the total annual cost of loans and sublets. Technologies used: LAMP, PHPUnit, Erlang, CSS ### Software Engineer @ IBM Jan 2002 – Jan 2008 | El Salto, Jalisco, Mexico Worked 2 years as a vendor and 3 more as a full-time employee. My team's responsibilities were developing the communications modules for the kernel of the "System i" (a.k.a. iSeries, AS/400). I gave maintenance to several components around the SNA protocol (IBM's alternative to TCP). I was also part of the effort to bridge together SNA and TCP in what's called "Enterprise Extender (HPR/IP)". By the end, I was the owner of Opticonnect, a high-speed system-to-system communication protocol/product. It's the fastest way to share data in the AS/400. Most of the technologies used there are proprietary but the thing to keep in mind is that IBM teaches you to work under pressure and in really constrained environments. Some work was done in C but most of it was in PL/MP and some days you had to debug assembler. There was a lot of pressure to find and fix bugs by a certain date because our clients are huge, such as HSBC, Bank of America, Staples and so on. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science Tecnológico de Monterrey ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/guillermoalcantara --- Source: https://flows.cv/guillermoalcantara JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/guillermoalcantara/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01