Xavi Ablaza
Xavi Ablaza
About
Detail
Chief Executive Officer
Bangkok, Thailand
My work sits at the intersection of software engineering, cloud infrastructure, business operations, and monetization. I’ve led technical projects inside startups with fewer than 100 people, held P&L responsibility, and built systems where reliability, cost control, and operational judgment mattered directly to revenue.
Before Hostari, I built and operated infrastructure-heavy products across e-commerce, and B2B SaaS. I've worked at a unicorn PE company focused on optimizing retail catalog operations in the early days of GPT-3, building my experience with engineering strategy. At Hostari, I helped reach $177K ARR by provisioning game servers on bare metal infrastructure for more than 700 customers. That experience taught me how to turn low-level infrastructure primitives like VMs, containers, bare metal, networking, orchestration, and configuration management into products that customers actually pay for.
My strongest language is Ruby, and I primarily work on Rails applications. I’m also professionally proficient in JavaScript, TypeScript, shell scripting, HTML, and CSS. On the infrastructure side, I have deep experience with Kubernetes for cloud workloads and Ansible for bare metal deployments.
My recent work has focused on applying that infrastructure background to the AI-native software era. As AI makes it easier for more people to create software, the harder problem becomes operating that software safely: deployment, permissions, observability, cost control, credentials, sandboxes, databases, rollback paths, and human review. Navegante is my answer to that shift.
I was born and raised in the Philippines, and I live in Thailand.
Selected wins from my time working in the US:
- Racked, cabled, and configured 1x 48U server rack with Juniper Networks EX2200 switch, APC PDUs, inside a Tier-1 datacenter with NixOS and Kubernetes supporting 2000 vCPUs, 4TB RAM, and 60TB of SSD storage
- Developed AWS Lambda architecture in Typescript to sync 220GB MySQL database with CSC’s Data Management Platform, allowing platform operators from shipping, merchandising, and customer support teams to build hundreds of internal chatbots and workflow management tools using GPT-3.5 on Slack
- Reduced shipping fees at TouchofModern by $800K USD/year implementing UPS Shipping integration in 5 weeks using Ruby and adapter design patterns & API normalization as a drop-in replacement for FedEx
Before Hostari, I built and operated infrastructure-heavy products across e-commerce, and B2B SaaS. I've worked at a unicorn PE company focused on optimizing retail catalog operations in the early days of GPT-3, building my experience with engineering strategy. At Hostari, I helped reach $177K ARR by provisioning game servers on bare metal infrastructure for more than 700 customers. That experience taught me how to turn low-level infrastructure primitives like VMs, containers, bare metal, networking, orchestration, and configuration management into products that customers actually pay for.
My strongest language is Ruby, and I primarily work on Rails applications. I’m also professionally proficient in JavaScript, TypeScript, shell scripting, HTML, and CSS. On the infrastructure side, I have deep experience with Kubernetes for cloud workloads and Ansible for bare metal deployments.
My recent work has focused on applying that infrastructure background to the AI-native software era. As AI makes it easier for more people to create software, the harder problem becomes operating that software safely: deployment, permissions, observability, cost control, credentials, sandboxes, databases, rollback paths, and human review. Navegante is my answer to that shift.
I was born and raised in the Philippines, and I live in Thailand.
Selected wins from my time working in the US:
- Racked, cabled, and configured 1x 48U server rack with Juniper Networks EX2200 switch, APC PDUs, inside a Tier-1 datacenter with NixOS and Kubernetes supporting 2000 vCPUs, 4TB RAM, and 60TB of SSD storage
- Developed AWS Lambda architecture in Typescript to sync 220GB MySQL database with CSC’s Data Management Platform, allowing platform operators from shipping, merchandising, and customer support teams to build hundreds of internal chatbots and workflow management tools using GPT-3.5 on Slack
- Reduced shipping fees at TouchofModern by $800K USD/year implementing UPS Shipping integration in 5 weeks using Ruby and adapter design patterns & API normalization as a drop-in replacement for FedEx
