santiscalzadonna.com

Senior Research Engineer · Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Santiago
Scalzadonna

Twenty years of software engineering, ten of them designing and running cloud-native platforms. Today I’m bringing Kubernetes and HPC together for AI at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Santiago smiling while working on a laptop
“The future is unwritten.”— Joe Strummer

01 — about

From front-end pixels
to production platforms.

I’m a senior DevOps and cloud platform engineer. I design, automate and operate cloud-native infrastructure, on Kubernetes and other container platforms, in both public clouds and on-premises.

I started out writing Java EE back ends and front ends, and built data visualizations for telecom, travel and media companies. Those years taught me what developers need from a platform, and now I build those platforms: EKS clusters, Terraform, and CI/CD with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Kargo. I care about scalability, security and keeping reliability affordable.

I’ve worked with distributed, cross-functional teams in transportation, automotive, media and SaaS, as well as several United Nations agencies. That work taught me as much about communication and mediation as it did about infrastructure.

Today I’m a Senior Research Engineer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I build data platform services and workflows for the BSC AI Factory, where cloud-native practice meets high-performance computing.

02 — experience

Where I’ve been building.

  1. Oct 2026 — now

    Senior Research Engineer

    Barcelona Supercomputing Center

    Data platform services for publishing datasets and models, AI-ready data workflows, Kubernetes–HPC convergence on GPU infrastructure, and Trusted Research Environments (TREs) for the BSC AI Factory.

  2. 2024 — 2026

    Senior DevOps / Cloud Engineer

    Boats Group

    Multi-region AWS: EKS, RDS and serverless workloads. Infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD with GitHub, Jenkins and ArgoCD, with an emphasis on reliability and security hardening.

  3. 2022 — 2024

    Platform Engineer

    SEAT CODE

    Scalable, secure cloud platforms used by many product teams: Kubernetes on CNCF tooling, CI/CD and automation patterns, plus security and cost controls.

  4. 2021 — 2022

    Cloud Platform Administrator

    United Nations ICC · remote

    Cloud-native infrastructure, incident management and governance across public and private clouds, for UN projects ranging from agriculture to cybersecurity.

  5. 2020 — 2021

    Cloud Solution Engineer

    Logicalis · for CaixaBank

    Public cloud governance: visualization, observability and cost tools across AWS, Azure, IBM and Google Cloud, plus coaching junior developers.

  6. 2015 — 2020

    DevOps / SRE Engineer

    YouBIM · remote

    Highly available systems on AWS. CI/CD with Jenkins and Artifactory, and deployment automation with Docker, Ansible and Terraform.

  7. 2007 — 2019

    Freelance and earlier engineering roles

    Motorola Mobility, Nexius, TradeHelm, WiCom, eSolutions, QPlus and others

    Java EE and front-end engineering, data dashboards and visualizations, and e-commerce and site reliability work for clients in the US and EU.

03 — expertise

What I work with.

Cloud & containers

  • AWS
  • EKS
  • ECS
  • EC2
  • RDS
  • S3
  • VPC
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Serverless
  • GCP
  • Azure

Infrastructure as code & delivery

  • Terraform
  • Crossplane
  • ArgoCD
  • Kargo
  • GitHub Actions
  • Jenkins
  • Ansible

Reliability & operations

  • SRE practices
  • Observability
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Incident management
  • Multi-region
  • Security hardening
  • Vulnerability scanning
  • Linux

Software, data & AI

  • Python
  • Bash
  • JavaScript
  • Java EE
  • HPC workflows
  • GPU infrastructure
  • Data platforms

Certifications

  • DeepLearning.AI Data Engineering Professional
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate
  • AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • Information Visualization (NYU)

Education

  • Postgrad, AI with Deep LearningUPC School
  • Postgrad, Cloud Native ArchitectureUPC School
  • Software EngineeringUniversidad Siglo 21
  • Systems EngineeringUniversidad Tecnológica Nacional
  • Business Administration for SMEsUniversidad Nacional de Córdoba

04 — selected work

Projects I’ve helped build.

MLOps flow for the project: code pushed through GitHub to a ClearML server that queues training jobs on Google Cloud GPU machines, monitored with Weights & Biases
UPC · 2026

AIDL — Fingerspelling

Deep learning postgrad project · Case study ↗
Architecture diagram of the Cloud Native Dev Platform: Terraform and GitHub Actions deploy an EKS management cluster running ArgoCD and Crossplane, which deploys workloads to EKS clusters in any region
UPC · 2023

Cloud Native Dev Platform

Postgraduate project in platform engineering · Case study ↗
Flights and hotels reservation dashboard
TUI Travel

Flights & hotels reservation dashboard

Data visualization
4G LTE network deployment monitoring tool
Verizon Wireless

4G LTE network deployment monitoring

Data visualization
Topic Flower social media analysis tool
Topic Flower

Social media strategy & impact

Data tools
ThinkCERCA student performance dashboard
ThinkCERCA

Student performance dashboards & reports

Data tools

Organizations I’ve worked with

  • Barcelona Supercomputing Center
  • Boats Group
  • SEAT CODE
  • United Nations
  • CaixaBank
  • YouBIM
  • Motorola
  • American Airlines
  • Verizon Wireless
  • Claro
  • TUI Group
  • MotoGP

05 — contact

Let’s build
something good.