Always Engineering & Moving Fast

About me

I’m Rafa, a Senior Software Engineer at Spotify, working on problems at scale for hundreds of millions of listeners from the lovely and sunny city of Granada, Spain.

I’ve been building software professionally since 2014, when I finished my Master’s Degree in Computer Science -mHealthDroid as my dissertation- and moved to the UK looking for a job. More than a decade later, I’m still having fun.

I consider myself a very pragmatic engineer, solution and delivery focused, who loves leading teams to move fast while writing robust code. My home turf is Android, but I’m a generalist at heart: I’ve had gigs where I was purely heads-down on Android, and others where I was meeting clients, scoping their projects, and building the backend and the Android & iOS apps end to end. Lately I’ve also been having a lot of fun tinkering with LLMs and AI tooling - some of that makes it to the blog.

The journey so far:

  • rippll, as a Mobile Developer, where I built a geo-location SDK along with some bespoke Android and iOS apps. Learned tons about moving fast and thinking big, no matter how tiny your company might be.
  • Sportlobster, as an Android Developer. The company was very fast-paced, which made me a better developer (and communicator!) real quick. After a while I ended up leading the Android team.
  • Backpacking in Asia for 6 months. After 4 years of learning and working very intensively, my body and mind needed a break. I immersed myself in other cultures and had the best time of my life.
  • Back to earth, I joined Memrise as a Senior Android Developer, helping people learn languages in a proactive medium-size organisation. I learned that apps with many users come with big responsibilities. By the end of my tenure I was leading the Android team.
  • DevelopIt, a company I founded with two friends as a side job, building ad-hoc projects on the mobile health ecosystem with wearable devices. I did everything from pitching projects to building backends and mobile apps end to end. I learned a lot about dealing with clients, and understood that code is only a small part of success.
  • Spotify, where I am today. Several years in, shipping features used by a good chunk of the planet and still loving every bit of it.

How am I outside work? A very normal guy I’d say. Love making jokes and keeping things fun. Really into sports, especially football and tennis. Traveling. Movies. Video-games. And a huge dog lover.

Want to say hi? Find me on X or LinkedIn - doggo photos always welcome.