Hi; my name is Esteban Torres and I’m an Engineering Manager @ Spotify in Berlin & currently working on Backstage.

I’m originally from 🇨🇷Costa Rica where I started as an Engineer and quickly jumped on the iOS badwagon; this led me to land a job as an iOS @ SoundCloud which of course led to me & my family moving to 🇩🇪.

During my time at SoundCloud I wore many hats:

• iOS Engineer (Listening Cluster and later on Core Clients)
• Cross Platform Engineer (Core Clients were I got to do Scala, Go, some Production Engineering, iOS & Android development, etc)
• And most recently Engineering Management

I used to be moderately active in the iOS community and tried to attend different conferences (as an attendee as well as an speaker) but has since I switched careers I slowed down a lot in that front.

It’s been a few years since I started working as an Engineering Manager and lots of things have happened:

• Managed to help a former member of my team transition to a different team where they could grow even more and exert a bigger and wider impact
• Had to manage one of the biggest projects the company (SoundCloud) had seen, involving multiple teams, contractors and all 3 major clients
• Took over a 2nd team, which focuses mainly on Back End Engineering Productivity
• Switched jobs and landed an amazing one working closely with OSS

It is fair to say I’m still figuring out things on the new role, but the day-to-day has changed from “I have no idea what I am doing” to “I have no idea what I am doing, but I’ve seen this before”. Looking forward to growing more on this new chapter, although I haven’t stopped coding, mainly in Go and very recently started learning Rust.

I’ve been jotting down what I learn in a good old paper notebook which I’ll try to migrate to a more modern place in this website.

You can find me on GitHub and Twitter Mastodon as @esttorhe.