# Victor Mendiluce > Principal Software Engineer - Course Hero Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/victormendiluce With 20 years of experience across games, data, infrastructure, and machine learning, I consider myself a generalist. Before joining Course Hero, I shipped three large video games, delivered a machine learning product, and led teams of various sizes across diverse technology stacks. Some of my specialties include: - Building scalable, fast, and maintainable software - from small agile codebases to large monoliths and service‑oriented systems. - Driving team productivity through clear processes, mentoring, and technical leadership. - Cloud infrastructure expertise: AWS, Azure, GCP. - Proficient in Python, Java, C#/.NET. - Data engineering: CDC ingestion, Spark, SQL warehouses, batch and streaming pipelines, Airflow. ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Course Hero Jan 2022 – Present Key architect of the company's data-driven culture, originally building the foundational platform that the entire organization relies on. The Heroflow framework and the Medallion data warehouse are now the standard for hundreds of engineers and analysts. As a trusted advisor and mentor, I frequently helped 10+ teams solve their hardest problems, contributing to the company's collaboration culture. - Saved over $2M annually by leading company-wide cost optimization initiatives. Worked hands-on with multiple teams to optimize infrastructure and data pipelines, and to implement proactive monitoring. Led the zero-downtime migration of a 1B-vector embedding index to OpenSearch, saving $300K annually while maintaining performance parity. - Stepped in to quickly replace a critical legacy data ingestion system after its previous owners departed, preventing any disruption to data availability. The new system was designed for simplicity and maintainability by the team, and resulted in 60% lower operational costs. - Committed to team growth and mentoring: Contributed to my team having a "high engagement team" rating according to company surveys. Improved the engineering recruitment process to reduce bias and raise the technical bar. Frequent advisor to teams like SEO, Machine Learning, and Analytics on infrastructure, data engineering, and cost management. ### Staff Software Engineer - Data @ Course Hero Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area - Built Heroflow, a declarative data processing framework in Python, organically adopted by 30+ engineers across the company over the years. Received widespread positive feedback for its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to accelerate development. - Designed and implemented the foundational Medallion data warehouse, which serves as the single source of truth for hundreds of internal customers and remains a cornerstone of the company’s data infrastructure. - Led the use of Apache Airflow as the company's central data orchestrator. Enabled 400+ company-wide automated processes, and empowered teams to self-serve their data needs. Authored "CHOperators", a shared library of custom operators to standardize and simplify pipeline development. Created "Course Hero Academy" training materials and template DAGs to accelerate developer onboarding. Drove adoption by providing rapid and continuous support to numerous teams and individuals. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Manticore Games Inc. Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area - Founding backend member (1 of 2); co-grew the team from 2 to 15 engineers, establishing hiring standards, onboarding, and technical bar. - Designed and deployed a multi-cloud and multi-region Kubernetes architecture that minimized latency to players while providing great availability, scalability, and cost advantages. - Contributed to most parts of the codebase: game hosting service, web api, presence, build system, monitoring, deployments, etc. - Instituted engineering fundamentals (coding guidelines, code review practices, CI/testing, observability) to accelerate safe delivery. - The platform's technical readiness helped the company grow from Series A to Series C, demonstrating stability, completeness, and clean, simple implementation - frequently praised by new hires for being easy to work with. ### VP Engineering @ Scientific Revenue Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area At Scientific Revenue we pioneered Machine Learning to drive price optimization for the digital economy. Some of my achievements were: - Developed a vision and prototype of version 2 of the platform. - Reduced our AWS bill by 50%. - Re-architected our release process. We moved to a weekly schedule of well-tested versions while reducing downtime by 90%. ### Lead Software Engineer @ Scientific Revenue Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area As part of the platform team, some of my accomplishments were: - Rewrote a significant portion of the Java backend to make it scalable while at the same time simplifying the architecture. After 4 months of work, the new backend was put in production seamlessly, with no downtime and no significant bugs. - Several optimizations. Two batch jobs went from over 10 hours to minutes. - Designed and implemented some business-critical features that encompassed the full system, from the SDKs to the Data Pipeline. - Implemented an innovative debug mechanism that increased reliability of the system by making it easier to detect bugs before deploying to production. Dozens of bugs in production were avoided thanks to it. - Deployed and managed an Elasticsearch stack as our logging infrastructure. ### Cofounder & CTO @ Unusual Studios, Inc. Jan 2010 – Jan 2015 | Madrid, San Francisco Cofounded and led all the technical aspects of Unusual Studios, a game studio with two released games for Facebook and Mobile (iOS & Android), both of them with great key performance indicators. - Unusual Soccer reached 4.2 stars and 200k DAUs with minimal marketing investment. - Football Stars achieved 4.3 stars and 300k DAUs. - Epic Eleven was implemented from idea to completion in less than a year, including backend, web portal, and mobile apps. ### Cofounder & CTO @ UNUSUAL WONDER STUDIOS SL Jan 2007 – Jan 2015 | Greater Madrid Metropolitan Area Co-founded and led all technical aspects of Unusual Wonder, a leading Spanish interactive agency with 100+ clients. Building my own services company taught me to deliver software on time and within budget. - Unity3D, web technologies (Javascript, Dart, Node.js). - Microsoft stack as our backend technology: .NET, C#, LINQ, MS SQL Server. - Cloud infrastructure using AWS. ### Technical Director @ Pyro Studios Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 | Greater Madrid Metropolitan Area Developed an engine to support all the company's games for the next-gen consoles (360 and PS3). Final decisions about the architecture of this technology. Planning, recruiting, process definition, and resource management. ### Lead Programmer - Commandos Strike Force @ Pyro Studios Jan 2001 – Jan 2005 | Greater Madrid Metropolitan Area In charge of the engineering team of a multi-platform game (PS2, Xbox and PC). Planning, process definition, and resource management. I recruited most of the 15 programmers, defined and coded the game architecture, and helped everybody in my team with everyday technical issues. The game was released internationally by Eidos Interactive and received positive reviews (IGN 7.5, 8.5 PC Gamer UK). ### 3D Engine Programmer - Eurotour Cycling @ Dinamic Multimedia Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 In charge of the game engine for Eurotour Cycling. C++, DirectX, some assembler. The game was released in 7 countries and had a large fan community that lasted for years. ## Education ### Licenciatura Física Universidad de Sevilla ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/vmendi - Portfolio: http://www.unusualstudios.com - Portfolio: http://www.unusualwonder.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/victormendiluce JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/victormendiluce/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12