Career story

My work has moved from web interfaces to complete products, then into financial and blockchain systems, and now into intelligent interfaces.

That has covered consumer products, financial institutions, startups, open-source infrastructure, and technical communities since 2010. The work library and individual project pages carry the implementation details.

Interfaces and a JavaScript community

American Express needed credit-card marketing screens that could be tested and measured inside an established financial organization. As UI Engineer from 2010 to 2012 I built comparison sliders and landing pages, wired responsive layouts, A/B testing, and analytics, and helped move a large frontend from Dojo to jQuery.

I also founded Costa Rica JS in 2010. It grew past 2,000 developers through meetups, workshops, NodeSchool, and JSConf Costa Rica as Node.js and modern web frameworks arrived in the region.

AMC's YEAH! interactive streaming experience had to launch at SXSW 2013 with extras inside the film. As Lead UI Engineer from 2012 to 2014 I owned the frontend: the Facebook application, Brightcove streaming, and the back-office editing path. Alongside full-time roles I shipped a fantasy-tennis strategy game and a realtime flight-information display for ARINC.

From interfaces to a banking product

Wink was Costa Rica's first neobank: banking on a phone, without a branch visit. I joined as Lead Engineer in 2015 and stayed through 2018. I built the first version of the React Native application and AWS backend, integrated partner-bank APIs, and implemented biometric authentication through a native bridge.

Technology selection, project planning, partner and vendor coordination, security, recruiting, and team formation sat inside that product. A bank on a phone is only as good as the integrations, identity checks, and operations behind the screen.

Wink is also where I settled on something I still hold: technology should expand access rather than create new gatekeepers. Here that was literal. Opening a bank account stopped requiring a trip to a branch.

Complex financial and blockchain systems

The next stretch was the system-to-interface problem: token state, private chains, exchanges, and wallets that people actually use. The implementations are on /web3 and the project pages.

Tokens and protocol infrastructure came first. At Knowledge, from 2017 to 2018, I deployed an ERC-20 token for a mainnet ICO and built the marketplace and wallet around it. I also co-founded AsoBlockchain in 2017. At EOS Costa Rica, from 2018 to 2020, I helped launch the EOS mainnet, operated validators, and built a private EOSIO chain for Grant Thornton Labs.

Then exchanges and indexed chain data. Bitcash, from 2020 to 2021, was a peer-to-peer exchange whose product depended on a matching engine, browser signing, and a realtime EOS indexer. ChainGraph grew from that work into an open-source GraphQL toolkit for EOSIO and Antelope data.

RareMint, ZTX, Bitlauncher, and Opyn pushed the same problem into collectible auctions, a virtual-world wallet, a token launchpad, and an options trading interface.

Gabo Esquivel coding

Intelligent interfaces

Intelligent interfaces, in this work, means voice and chat, retrieval that decides what the model sees, and admin controls so a team can run the assistant after launch. Specialized assistants showed up inside Masterbots and Bitlauncher; in 2025 LegalAgent became the main evidence. That work sits on /ai.

Writing

The work now

I work as a product engineer across AI, full-stack applications, financial systems, and Web3. I work in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

Open to direct hire, international hire, or contracting through Blockmatic Labs LLC. Cannot work under W-2. Based in Costa Rica, working US Mountain Time.

Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. Start a conversation.