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 items from what I’ve been building and improving.

Scheduled job pattern to delay an outbound service call after event consumption

Deferred External API Call via DB-Backed Queue

A Pub/Sub event consumer that previously made an immediate synchronous call to an external REST API needed refactoring to defer that call by a configurable duration (12 hours). On event receipt, the processor inserts a record into a PostgreSQL queue table with an eligible_after timestamp. A Spring Boot @Scheduled job polls every 5 minutes for eligible records, executes the external API call, and deletes the row on success. Involved: Flyway DB migration, JPA entity/repository, consumer logic modification, and scheduled job implementation. Stack: Java, Spring Boot, GCP Pub/Sub, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes.

Java parser implementation for ingesting semi-structured court case records with custom Jackson deserializers and defensive data validation

Court Case CSV Parser with Lenient Date Deserialization and Null-Safe Enum Mapping

Implemented a bulk data parser that processes court case records from CSV files and transforms them into structured JSON objects for downstream consumption. The parser addresses common data quality issues found in legacy court system exports.