Gabo Esquivel - AI Engineer

With over 15 years in full-stack software engineering, I help organizations turn initial ideas into market-ready software products, ensuring concepts reach their full potential. I work as a product engineer, bridging technical execution with user experience and business strategy.

My journey with artificial intelligence began as a natural extension of my work in Web3 and fullstack development. As I explored these fields, I found myself drawn to the human side of technology—how we could create more intuitive ways for people to interact with complex systems. What captivated me wasn't just AI's technical capabilities, but its potential to transform interfaces into conversations, making technology more accessible and natural. This exploration became a personal passion, guiding my work toward building tools that amplify human capabilities rather than simply automating tasks.

AI Engineering Experience

My hands-on AI journey began in 2022 when I started exploring OpenAI's APIs during a period of intense personal curiosity. I still remember the moment I first connected language models to a simple application and watched it understand context and generate relevant responses—it felt like glimpsing the future of software. Those early experiments weren't just technical explorations; they reshaped how I thought about building products. Interfaces no longer needed to be static collections of buttons and forms—they could become dynamic conversations that adapted to users' needs and contexts.

Wizard World: NFT Generation

My first significant AI project came during the Flow Hackathon in late 2022, where I helped create Wizard World—a platform connecting OpenAI's DALL-E image generation capabilities with blockchain technology. The system used Next.js for the frontend and integrated with Flow blockchain through Niftory's NFT infrastructure.

This project was particularly meaningful as it combined two areas I was passionate about. What moved me most was witnessing people who had never considered themselves creative suddenly express artistic vision through simple language prompts, then preserve their creations as NFTs. One user, a retired teacher, told me they'd never created digital art before but had generated over a dozen pieces they were proudly sharing with family. Seeing her face light up when describing her creations reinforced my belief that technology should expand human creative potential rather than replace it.

Masterbots: Specialized AI Bots

By mid-2023, I was deeply immersed in AI development, working on Masterbots.ai—a platform I helped architect for creating domain-specific assistants. This project moved beyond generic AI interactions to specialized capabilities for specific knowledge domains. I implemented a system using pgvector in Supabase for efficient semantic search and Vercel AI SDKfor streaming responses with optimized prompt patterns. What truly excited me was seeing how these assistants could make specialized knowledge more accessible to everyone. I remember implementing a feature that allowed an assistant to explain complex medical terminology in plain language, and watching a user's face light up when they finally understood a condition they'd been researching. These moments reinforced my belief that AI should democratize knowledge rather than gatekeep it.

Bitlauncher: AI Crypto Launchpad

Later in 2023, I had the opportunity to bring AI capabilities to BitLauncher, merging my passions for Web3 and financial accessibility. Growing up in Costa Rica, I witnessed how financial complexity often created barriers to participation for many. This shaped my approach to the project—I wasn't just building a technical solution, but addressing a deeply personal challenge of democratizing investment knowledge. I developed a conversational assistant using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with AI SDK, OpenAI, and a PostgreSQL vector store that transformed how people researched investment opportunities. The system included tool integration for accessing real-time news and technical data about projects. During testing, I met a woman from my hometown who had been intimidated by crypto jargon for years. After a brief conversation with our assistant, she confidently explained auction mechanisms to another participant. That moment of transformation—from confusion to understanding—perfectly captured why I build technology: to remove unnecessary barriers to knowledge and opportunity.

LegalAgent: AI for Legal Operations

My most recent and perhaps most impactful AI work has been with LegalAgent in 2024, where I helped develop their React Native app for legal professionals. This project represented a significant personal milestone as it combined both voice and text interfaces in a high-stakes professional context. I implemented a multimodal AI assistant using OpenAI's Realtime API for voice and Vercel AI SDK for chat, creating a system that provides contextual legal support through Redis-backed RAG architecture. The frontend leveraged TanStack and Tailwindfor a responsive mobile experience. Having grown up watching my father practice law and struggle with the overwhelming volume of case documents, I felt a personal connection to this challenge. Building a system that lawyers could trust with sensitive information required not just technical solutions but deep empathy for their workflow and concerns.

What makes this project especially meaningful to me is the impact I've seen firsthand. A lawyer who had spent three hours the previous week searching for a specific precedent in a case file found it in seconds using the voice assistant. Another mentioned that they could finally review case notes while commuting, something previously impossible with traditional interfaces. These stories reinforce my belief that AI should amplify human expertise rather than attempt to replace it—augmenting capabilities while respecting professional judgment and the irreplaceable human elements of complex work.