Ricardo Coto
Cerro Chirripó, 3,821 meters

The highest mountain in Costa Rica, it is part of the Cordillera de Talamanca, and the range's highest point. It is located in Chirripó National Park and is noted for its ecological wealth.

I'm Software Engineer

About

Driven by persistence, effort, and humility, I’ve built a career across both front-end and back-end development. I’ve led technical teams, mentored talent, and delivered solutions in agile Scrum environments. I stay current through personal projects and have contributed to companies in the United States and Costa Rica. My work is grounded in strong faith and a solid academic background.

Software Engineer

Over 15 years of experience as a Software Engineer, delivering solutions across both on-premises and cloud environments. Experienced in a wide range of architectures, from monolithic applications to microservices-based distributed systems.

Proven track record in multiple technical leadership roles, including Developer, Team Lead, and Technical Lead. Skilled at guiding teams, making technical decisions, and delivering scalable, maintainable software solutions.

Strong focus on modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted software development, LLM-based collaboration tools, MCP integrations, and workflow automation. Experienced in using generative AI to accelerate development, debugging, documentation, analysis, and technical decision-making.

  • Email: richcoto@hotmail.com
  • City: San Jose, Costa Rica

Skills

JAVA 90%
SPRING BOOT 90%
MICROSERVICES 80%
NON RELATIONAL DBMS 50%
CLOUD 80%
FRONT END 50%
RELATIONAL DBMS 80%
GENERATIVE AI & LLM-ASSISTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT 60%

Resume

My recent experience has increasingly focused on working with AI-assisted development workflows, integrating MCPs, and exploring effective ways to generate code in collaboration with AI while keeping the output consistent with the project’s context, architecture, and business requirements.

I focus on applying AI in a defensive and disciplined way, ensuring that generated code follows scalable design principles, inherits existing best practices, aligns with established patterns, and remains maintainable, testable, and production-ready.

Sumary

Innovative and deadline-driven Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience designing and developing user-centered software, focus on development, architecture and performance.

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering

2001 - 2005

Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica

Professional Experience

Senior Software Engineer (AI Specialist)

2025 - Present

Contractor

  • Full event-driven architecture with Kafka-based pipelines in a fully responsive cloud environment
  • Scraping, converting, and handling data for persistence using Kafka, Playwright, Selenium, Python, and Java; maintaining microservices based on Quarkus
  • Point-of-sale client in a distributed architecture built with Java Spring Boot and React
  • Automation for sales sites using Playwright

Senior Software Engineer

2023 - 2025

Datasite, Cariari, Heredia, CR

  • Working in a fully distributed technology stack environment
  • Developing and maintaining microservices using Spring Boot (Java) and Kotlin
  • Operating in cloud environments, including AWS and Azure
  • Served as the main point of contact and lead developer for the DataFeeds team

Senior Staff Engineer (IC4)

2020 - 2023

Cloudera, Escazu, San Jose, CR

  • Worked with cloud-based infrastructure in AWS.
  • Developed and maintained Java-based microservices using Spring Boot
  • Integrated and supported Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for e-commerce
  • Worked with Salesforce for CRM-related functionality
  • Managed identity and access control using Okta (IAM)
Download Full Version Resume

Currently Working On

Recent work highlights — the kind of problems I’m solving day to day.

Platform migration · GitHub Actions · Kubernetes

GitLab to GitHub Migration — Supply Chain Microservices

Contributing to Nordstrom’s migration of 150+ supply-chain microservices from GitLab to GitHub Enterprise. I own 13 repositories — services, shared libraries, infra, and CronJobs — converting GitLab CI to GitHub Actions, deploying to Kubernetes via nsk-deploy, and tightening IAM from broad deployment roles to scoped IRSA. Also handled Vault secrets, Terraform state migration, per-app S3 DLQ CronJobs, and Gradle 7→8 upgrades across Java/Spring Boot services.

Browser automation · GraalJS · Selenium

Fixing a Navigation Race in Court-Records Scraper

Diagnosed a production scraper failing mid-run at a high rate: a referer-spoof script fired two navigations during page unload, killing the WebDriver in ~4ms. Retry logic already handled the soft failure path, but not when the same issue surfaced as a thrown exception. Scoped a targeted JavaScript fix on GraalJS/Selenium — no library release required.

Quarkus · REST API · Vendor integration

CAPTCHA Bad-Solve Feedback Endpoint

Built a Quarkus REST endpoint to report incorrectly solved CAPTCHAs back to the upstream vendor — direct cost and accuracy impact per solve. Implemented against the real upstream API (not a stale ticket design), documented API limitations around error semantics, and tracked cross-repo release sequencing while waiting on shared-library merges.

Snake

Do you remember the Snake game back when the Nokia 6120 came out? Yeah, I'm old... Use arrow keys, on-screen controls, or swipe on the game board.

Score: 0 Best: 0

Press Start, Space, or swipe to play