Andrés Montero — Senior Software Engineer in Costa Rica
I'm a senior software engineer and engineering manager based in Costa Rica. I've spent the last several years building web products and the cloud infrastructure underneath them — most recently at SurveyMonkey, and before that on fraud and risk systems at Featurespace, part of Visa.
What I work on
I work across the stack in Python and React, and I care just as much about the systems underneath: reliable, reproducible infrastructure, clean data pipelines, and cloud foundations you can actually reason about. Most of that runs on AWS and is defined in Terraform, across multi-account environments where a mistake is expensive and a manual change is a liability.
The work I enjoy most sits at the seam between product and platform — the place where a feature's success depends on whether the infrastructure under it was designed for the load, the failure modes, and the next three features nobody has specced yet. I like shipping fast, and then measuring honestly whether it worked.
Engineering from Costa Rica
Costa Rica sits at UTC−6 and doesn't observe daylight saving, so my working day overlaps cleanly with the United States — Austin, New York, Miami, and California all land inside normal hours without anyone doing timezone math at midnight. That makes nearshore collaboration genuinely synchronous rather than a handoff between shifts.
I work in Spanish and English, with US-based and distributed teams. Beyond my own contracts, I'm building an engineering team here in Costa Rica — there's a deep pool of senior talent in this country that US companies consistently underestimate, and closing that gap is some of the most satisfying work I do.
How I like to work
Increasingly the job is leading as well as building. I'm drawn to small, accountable teams with clear ownership and deliberately sharp boundaries between them — the structure that lets good engineers do their best work without ceremony getting in the way.
I'd rather write the runbook than be the runbook. If a system needs me specifically in order to keep running, I've built it wrong.
Experience
- 2025 - Present
Product founder · Fisionow
Founded and built the product vision, architecture, and customer journey for a modern physio platform.
- 2025 - Present
Senior Software Engineer, Level II · SurveyMonkey
Modernized core platform components with AWS-native migrations, legacy refactors, and Terraform across multi-account environments, improving reliability and maintainability at scale.
- 2024 - 2025
Senior Software Engineer, Level III · IX - FeatureSpace (Visa)
At ImagineX Studio, modernized Python services, hardened inter-service auth, and expanded automated testing for the fraud and risk platform. Contributed to ADRs, secure ADF data pipelines, and Grafana Lambda observability.
- 2023 - 2024
Senior Software Engineer · FusionHit
Delivered scalable web apps and cloud integrations with a focus on reliability and clean service boundaries.
- 2022 - 2023
Senior Software Engineer · BEON
Led delivery for PropertyMeld and FindMine, shipping full-stack features and API improvements.
- 2020 - 2022
Software Engineer · Growth Acceleration Partners
Shipped web products across Python, React, and AWS while improving delivery pipelines.
Tech focus
Get in touch
Open to senior and staff engineering roles, and to interesting problems in between. The fastest way to reach me is andres@montero.cr — or take a look at selected work and what I've been writing.