Profile

• Principal Data Engineer and hands-on technical lead who defines strategy and builds production retrieval, ranking, and evaluation systems.
• Strong background in Python, AWS, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, distributed queues, ranking/retrieval workflows, document enrichment, and human-in-the-loop ML/LLM systems.
• Experienced in public-sector and independent projects involving open data, digital participation, and large document collections.

Professional Experience

Expert Institute

Principal Data Engineer + Technical Lead · New York, NY / Remote · 2022 - Present

Set the technical direction for a large-scale matching and recommendation program while contributing directly to its implementation.

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Lead the ML/Data team responsible for retrieval and recommendations while contributing directly to ranking and evaluation systems.
• Define the technical strategy, quality framework, and production architecture for search and recommendation systems, and implement core components.
• Designed and shipped an LLM-assisted recommendation system combining semantic and full-text retrieval with reusable ranking signals.
• Established confidence thresholds and validation practices to determine when recommendations could be automated safely.
• Operate the document-processing platform that supports these systems using AWS Lambda, SQS, and PostgreSQL.

Freelance and Volunteer Work

Senior Software Engineer / Project Lead · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2020 - Present

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Led product and software development for a foundation’s Django project, coordinating a team of around six people.
• Built backend services, Django REST APIs, Celery tasks, and deployment infrastructure.

Gavelytics

Senior Data Engineer · Los Angeles, CA / Remote · 2021 - 2022

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Built data pipelines, ETL processes, data models, and data architecture for legal analytics products.
• Developed data science, NLP, and MLOps workflows.

Municipality of Montevideo

Technical Project Management, Data Pipelines, Research, and Development · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2017 - 2021

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Designed and developed a data pipeline for retrieving, enriching, and visualizing social media mentions related to the city.
• Deployed a scalable microservices architecture that can connect new data sources and text/image processing modules.
• Helped the organization measure citizen interaction on social networks, detect events, and trigger alerts.
• Technically led a multichannel chatbot project, coordinating vendors and the internal development team.
• Researched and developed NLP and ML features for citizen-service channels, including WhatsApp.

e-Participation Project, Udelar - Agesic

Research, Architecture, and Tooling · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2019 - 2021

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Contributed to a multidisciplinary initiative between the University of the Republic and the Uruguayan state that developed guidance for digital citizen participation.
• Directed the selection, adaptation, and deployment of open-source participation tools.
• Proposed an architecture for integrating those tools into a shared platform.

NLP Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Republic

Research Assistant · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2017 - 2019

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Researched anonymization and automatic classification of judicial decisions with the Natural Language Processing group.
• Experimented with language-processing techniques for legal/judicial documents.

Magnesium Coop

Founding Partner, Developer, DevOps · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2015 - 2021

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Co-founded the cooperative and developed software and web services for companies and civil-society organizations.
• Configured and maintained CI/CD pipelines for deploying and scaling services.

Uruguayan Postal Service

Full-stack Developer · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2014 - 2017

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Researched and developed the organization’s first high-availability services for receiving postal events.

Total Server Solutions

Linux Systems Administrator · Montevideo, Uruguay · 2007 - 2008

Selected impact and responsibilities

• Administered Linux systems and implemented attack detection, prevention, and service monitoring.

Selected Independent Projects

draftingdocs.org

Collaborative drafting for sensitive documents, with AI suggestions treated as reviewable proposals that require explicit human approval and preserve a traceable change history.

memoria.uy

Open-source experiment on news perception in Uruguay. Anonymous votes and clustering reveal aggregate patterns in how people interpret the news.

Cruzar

Engineering collaboration on a large historical archive, focused on tools for extracting, organizing, and searching more than 3M documents.

Marcha Virtual

Adapted an open-source system so people could participate virtually in Uruguay’s March of Silence from social networks during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Urgent Consideration Law Compared

Built a website using open data so citizens could compare article-by-article changes in Uruguay’s Urgent Consideration Law. The site reached 1.4M visits in six months.

Skills

Search, recommendations, and applied AI: OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, semantic search, full-text search, vector search, pgvector, ranking/reranking, confidence scoring, recall analysis, feedback classification, OpenAI API, Gemini API, Claude, human-in-the-loop workflows.

Data platforms and orchestration: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redshift, DynamoDB, S3, dbt, AWS Lambda, SQS, Celery, Redis, Kafka, Luigi, ETL, data modeling, document ingestion, task routing, priority queues.

Programming and backend systems: Python, TypeScript, Java, Django, FastAPI, Flask, NestJS, React, REST APIs, domain-driven design.

Machine learning and NLP: Scikit-learn, spaCy, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, SageMaker, embeddings, document classification, information extraction, summarization, parsing.

Infrastructure and observability: Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, AWS, ECS, OpenShift, DigitalOcean, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, QuickSight, Looker Studio, Streamlit, Langfuse, GitLab.

Participation and collaboration platforms: Discourse, Decidim.

Education

University of the Republic, Faculty of Engineering · Montevideo, Uruguay

• Master’s studies in Data Science and Machine Learning · Paused
• Computer Engineering · 2017
• Computer Analyst · 2015

Cambridge University / Anglo Uruguayo · Paysandú, Uruguay

• First Certificate in English · 2003

Courses

• Media, Politics and Polarization · FIC Permanent Education · 2020
• SIGES Workshop · IM Training and Studies Center · 2020
• Deep Learning Specialization · Coursera / DeepLearning.AI · 2018
• Machine Learning · Coursera / Stanford · 2018
• Literary Motivation Workshop · Onetto Literary Workshops · 2016, 2017, 2020

Presentations

• Analysis of e-participation tools · Virtual Seminar on Open Government, Agesic · September 2020
• Extraction of events in a city from social networks · SIMBig 2018, Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru · September 2018
• Analytical Intelligence Conference · Hotel Crystal Tower · December 2017
• Sample Engineering · Faculty of Engineering · October 2017 · Second prize awarded by the Institute of Computing
• 3rd Meeting of Smart Cities for Inclusion · Municipality of Montevideo · August 2017

Publications

• Martínez Puga, M., & Speroni, R. (2026). El ejercicio de despolarizar la discusión pública. Informatio, 31(1), e207. https://doi.org/10.35643/Info.31.1.12
• Steglich, M., Speroni, R., & Prada, J. (2019). Twitter Event Detection in a City. 5th International Conference, SIMBig 2018, Lima, Peru. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11680-4_5