Andres Villanueva

Software engineer who found his calling in growing engineers and teams. Originally from Venezuela, based in Buenos Aires since 2015. Over the last decade I've shipped products across LATAM and the US — from Mercado Libre to HeroDevs, where I built the company's Talent & Engineering function from scratch as Head of Talent & Engineering: hiring 20+ engineers, designing career ladders, launching mentorship and onboarding programs, and helping build the engineering culture. After 10 months in that role, I made the call to step back to a senior IC role. The scope was Director-level and I had jumped from IC without mentorship or the org structure to sustain it. I learned more about engineering leadership in those 10 months than in years of IC work — and I learned exactly what I need to operate at my best next time: clear objectives, strong management culture, and peers to grow with. What energizes me most: unblocking engineers, mentoring through hard problems, and shipping product that matters. I've led frontend teams at Wenance and HeroDevs, architected systems that scaled from MVP to hundreds of thousands of users (Eulerr), and consistently been the person teammates come to when they're stuck. Since 2016 I've been part of the Buenos Aires tech community — speaking at meetups, organizing GDG Buenos Aires, and earning the Google Developer Expert title for Firebase (2018) and Angular (2019). Community work taught me what I now believe is the core of engineering leadership: the most valuable work happens between people, not just in the code. I'm now ready to return to engineering management — this time with the right structure, the technical depth I've sharpened in the last two years, and the clarity that comes from having done it before. "I would give everything I know for half of what I ignore." — René Descartes Everybody calls me "Pana". If you read this far, mention "Una Arepa Pelúa, para llevar mi pana" when you say hi — I'll know you didn't skip the details.