Product engineer · Web · Since 2010
I turn product ideas into software people actually use.
I'm Jesús Zavala, a software engineer on the web team at Gametime, working remotely from Mexicali, México. For fifteen years I've taken web products from a rough idea to something shipped, measured, and maintained.
- Now
- Software Engineer, Gametime
- Based in
- Mexicali, México
- Time zone
- Pacific · same as California
- Languages
- Spanish (native) · English (C2)
Selected work
Products I built end to end.
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01
NoWildo
Community platform · Live since 2024
The site of a late-night Spanish-language Twitch channel: a film archive fed by TMDB, a daily guess-the-movie game, raffles, a site currency with its own slot machine, a 3D desert arcade and a poster bracket on a pannable map. Astro, Supabase and Twitch login, with much of the logic in Postgres.
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02
mexicali.vip
Small business · Storefront
A storefront for a maker of handmade party centerpieces in Mexicali. Designs are browsed by the birthday kid's age, every piece gets its own indexable, shareable page, several can be viewed in 3D and placed on your own table in AR, and orders go straight to WhatsApp. Next.js.
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03
PREP Libre
Civic tech · Open source
An open-source Preliminary Electoral Results Program for Mexico's local electoral bodies, built on the INE's Anexo 13 rules: a Postgres schema derived from the official formats, Baja California's districting seeded from INE data, SQL-level tests and a public demo. In design and architecture, shaped by my years at IEEBC.
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04
Vodyet
Personal finance · PWA
A Spanish-language expense tracker: monthly budgets by category, credit balances, recurring payments and a spending trend chart, behind Google sign-in with row-level security so every record stays the user's own. React, Vite and Supabase, installable as a PWA.
Experience
Since 2010, from regional businesses in Mexicali to a US consumer marketplace.
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Gametime
Software Engineer · Remote
Frontend systems for the web product, in close partnership with Design, Product and Backend. Led SEO work that lifted conversion across the site, and raise the bar on quality through code review.
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IEEBC
Full-stack Software Engineer · Instituto Estatal Electoral de Baja California
Designed and maintained the systems used during live elections, cutting data discrepancies by 30%, and built Django REST APIs for internal data tracking.
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Timbox
Software Engineer
SOAP services in Ruby on Rails, OpenPay payment integration, and AngularJS workflows for invoice stamping and credit tracking.
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SRAX
Software Engineer
Laravel REST APIs and Handlebars templates. Automated server configuration with Puppet to cut deployment time.
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Iconos
Software Developer & IT Support
Business-process automation for more than ten regional companies, plus IT support that cut client downtime by 40%.
About
I care about the whole product, not just my slice.
Most of my career has been on small teams where the engineer who builds the feature is also the one who hears from the person using it. I like that. It made me a product engineer before I knew the term: someone who reads the analytics, questions the spec, and ships anyway.
Off the clock I build the side projects above, mostly for the fun of taking something from zero to real.
- Start with the user's job. Before picking a stack I want to know what the feature has to do for someone, and how we'll know it did.
- Own it past launch. SEO, performance, accessibility and edge cases are part of the feature, not a follow-up ticket.
- Build for the next engineer. Reusable systems and boring, readable code, so the team ships faster next quarter too.
- Frontend
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, Astro, HTML & CSS
- Backend
- Node.js, Express, Django, Ruby on Rails, Supabase, MongoDB
- Also
- Python, Ruby, PHP, Java
- Education
- CETYS Universidad, 2012–2016
- English
- C2 Proficient, EF SET certified
Contact
Let's build something people use.
Happy to talk about product engineering roles, hard problems, or the side project you can't stop thinking about.
jesus@zvl.dev