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Carlos Cativo

Senior Tech Lead — Payments, Healthcare Platforms & Backend Architecture

cativo@cativo.dev·cativo23.kt@gmail.com·El Salvador (UTC-6) · EN/ES·cativo.dev·github.com/cativo23·linkedin.com/in/carlos-cativo

Summary

Tech Lead with 9 years building production backend systems, currently leading a team of 5 engineers at Blue Medical Guatemala. Scaled a payment platform from ~$30K to ~$450K USD/mo while shipping 3 services from scratch: a multi-gateway payment processor (VGS tokenization, PCI-DSS scope reduction), an electronic invoicing system with SAP integration, and a multi-agent AI voice product. Stack-fluid across Laravel/PHP, TypeScript/NestJS, and Python/FastAPI. Open to Senior Backend, Tech Lead, and Engineering Manager roles — remote-first or with relocation sponsorship.

Experience

Tech Lead / Full-Stack Engineer — Blue Medical

Apr 2022 — Present · Guatemala (Remote)
  • Lead developer across payment, e-invoicing, subscription, and AI voice platforms — owned design, delivery, and on-call from greenfield to production.
  • Built a Laravel payment microservice with a Strategy-pattern gateway abstraction over heterogeneous protocols (ISO 8583, SOAP/XML, REST). VGS card vault for PCI-friendly tokenization; network tokenization on top of the vault. Per-commerce / per-card-token routing, Horizon queues per gateway, Livewire ops dashboard. Led an OWASP-grade audit and ongoing security hardening.
  • Shipped Guatemala FEL e-invoicing service through an authorized provider with multi-establishment support, async processing on Horizon/Redis, SAP integration for results and credit notes, and a Livewire ops dashboard with response-time analytics.
  • Built BlueMeds, a medication subscription platform: lifecycle, delivery scheduling, insurance authorization, referral codes, Meilisearch catalog search, and 10+ third-party integrations across ERP, CRM, messaging, AI calling, and healthcare middleware.
  • Primary author of sofIA, a multi-agent voice system on ElevenLabs ConvAI + n8n for healthcare scheduling, currently in production. State-machine workflow with deterministic validation, retry, and recovery layers around tool calls. FastAPI control plane + Nuxt dashboard + Typer CLI.

Laravel, PHP, NestJS, FastAPI, Python, Livewire, Nuxt, Angular/Ionic, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis/Horizon, Meilisearch, AWS, Docker, Bitbucket Pipelines, Sentry, ElevenLabs ConvAI.

Backend Developer — OrangeSoftCo (Publimovil Regional)

Sep 2020 — Apr 2022 · El Salvador
  • Re-architected the Y.O.D.A. monolith into microservices with Redis Streams for inter-service communication, improving end-to-end performance ~30%.
  • Tightened GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Docker/K8s deploys on DigitalOcean, cutting build time ~20%.

Laravel, FastAPI, Python, MySQL, Redis Streams, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD.

Senior Developer — Mussol

Apr 2017 — Sep 2020 · El Salvador
  • Built an internal dashboard administering 100+ travel websites; set up AWS-based CI/CD that improved deploy time and reliability. Also shipped C#/Unity mobile games (TripXpertz).

Laravel, MySQL, AWS, C#/Unity.

Selected Projects

  • VittBot personal · in development — Multi-agent BTC/USDT trading bot on Binance: indicator pipeline feeds three Claude agents (Analyst, Trader, Validator) backed by a deterministic risk manager (10 hard-coded rules, never delegated to AI). NestJS, TypeScript, Anthropic SDK, CCXT, Prisma + PostgreSQL.
  • nova-id personal · in development — Zero Trust IAM stack using the Ory suite (Kratos, Hydra, Keto, Oathkeeper) with a NestJS admin API and Vue console. Ory Stack, NestJS, Vue, Docker.
  • Clarify personal · in development — AI legal-contract auditor (v1.0.0-alpha). PDF analysis, pay-per-analysis credits via Stripe webhooks, async processing on BullMQ. Nuxt, Supabase (Postgres + RLS), OpenAI, Stripe, BullMQ + Redis.
  • cativo.dev infrastructure — Self-hosted production stack: 16 containers across 6 stacks (apps, blog, mail, monitoring, proxy, databases) on my own infrastructure. Docker Compose, Linux, UFW, TLS, DNS.

Open Source · npm

  • lumira ~3.4K dl/mo — Real-time statusline HUD for Claude Code and Qwen Code. Session analytics, latency overhead widget, quota projection. Zero deps. TypeScript, npm.
  • nightwire ~475 dl/mo — Dark cyberpunk UI design system. Semantic color roles, neon palette, CLI installer. CSS, npm.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Bash, SQL
Backend
NestJS, Laravel 10/11, FastAPI
Frontend
Nuxt/Vue, Angular, Ionic, Tailwind
Data
PostgreSQL (Prisma, SQLAlchemy, Eloquent), MySQL, Redis, Meilisearch, Supabase
AI / Integrations
Anthropic Claude API, OpenAI, ElevenLabs ConvAI, multi-agent design, n8n, Stripe, Odoo, SAP, WhatsApp/Botmaker, Bland AI
Payments / Tax
Multi-gateway integration over heterogeneous protocols (ISO 8583, SOAP/XML, REST), VGS card vault, network tokenization, FEL e-invoicing (Guatemala), SAP
Infra / DevOps
Docker, Traefik, Nginx, AWS (S3/ECR/EC2), Cloudflare, GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, Prometheus, Sentry
Testing
Pest/PHPUnit, Vitest, Jest, BATS, TDD

Education

Universidad de El Salvador — B.Sc. Computer Systems Engineering, 2023. Specialization in Cloud Infrastructure.