Moises Romero
Principal / Staff Software Engineer · TypeScript, Full-Stack & AI-Native Products
Summary
TypeScript engineer with 15+ years building full-stack products that serve millions of requests per day. I work across the stack it powers: React, Next.js, and Angular on the front end, Node.js and GraphQL on the back end. I've also spent much of my career forward-deployed, embedded with enterprise customers to design and ship GraphQL supergraphs inside their own environments.
I like owning product features end to end, from the data layer up to the interface, and helping teams agree on the patterns and standards that keep a codebase healthy as it grows. I also came up through graphic design, so I'm comfortable bridging engineering and UX, and the products I ship hold up technically and visually.
Lately I've been building AI-native products, like KenNook, a self-hosted media library that runs local LLMs, on-device embeddings, and vector search. I lean on modern AI tooling to design, build, and ship more across the whole stack in less time.
Core Skills
Forward-Deployed Engineering: embedding with enterprise customers to build, integrate, and harden GraphQL federation and supergraphs in their environments
Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, Python, Kotlin, PHP, HTML5, CSS/SASS/LESS
Frontend: React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, Redux, Redux-Saga, Styled Components / Emotion, Webpack, Responsive Web Design
Backend: Node.js, Express, NestJS, GraphQL (Apollo Federation & supergraph), REST, WebSockets, Spring MVC, event-driven microservices
Data: MongoDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Spanner, Cassandra, BigQuery
Cloud & DevOps: AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, ECS/Fargate, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Cognito, Aurora/RDS, SQS/SNS, Secrets Manager), GCP (GKE, Cloud Functions, Spanner, BigQuery, Compute/App Engine), Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (AWS CDK), identity & SSO (Okta, OAuth), CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI), observability (Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, CloudWatch dashboards & alerting)
Testing: unit and integration (Jest, Mocha, Jasmine, JUnit), end-to-end (Cypress, Selenium), and BDD (Cucumber)
AI-Assisted Development: Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot
Leadership: Technical strategy, architecture design, code review, mentorship, cross-team alignment, Agile / Scrum
Selected Project
KenNook: AI-Native Personal Media Library (2025 - Present)
- Designed and built it end to end: a self-hosted, privacy-first media library that runs all AI on-device, so nothing ever leaves the machine.
- Implemented semantic + full-text search over photos and video with on-device vector embeddings and SQLite FTS5; added a local LLM, speech-to-text transcription, face detection / clustering, and automatic content classification.
- Built real-time cross-device sync (SSE + BroadcastChannel) with optimistic-concurrency writes, plus zero-config LAN discovery for setup-free access on any device.
Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, React, tRPC, SQLite
Experience
Staff Software Engineer, Apollo GraphQL (Dec 2021 - Present)
- Designed and led development of Apollo Studio features with product owners and designers, taking them from concept to launch.
- Enhanced and monitored the data ingestion pipeline, improving reliability and throughput for high-volume telemetry.
- Worked as a forward-deployed engineer embedded in enterprise customers' environments, building GraphQL supergraphs on both new and existing systems: coding in their repos, standing up CI/CD pipelines, and hardening their infrastructure for a more reliable federated graph.
- Made AI coding assistants (Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot) part of daily development, shipping features and refactors faster while keeping code quality and test coverage high.
Stack: GraphQL, React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Kotlin, Jest
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Walmart Global Tech (Jul 2019 - Dec 2021)
ASDA (asda.com), Walmart Canada (walmart.ca), Walmart Mexico (walmart.com.mx) | OneOps: Kubernetes, Cassandra, cloud VMs
- Worked across three teams (ASDA, infrastructure, and Walmart Canada), shipping client-side features and making sure data moved reliably through the infrastructure tiers.
- Led the migration of a monolithic REST API estate to GraphQL, modernizing data access for high-traffic storefronts.
- Unified the user experience across the Walmart Canada properties so the sites felt consistent.
Stack: GraphQL, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, React, Redux, Redux-Saga, Styled Components, Cypress, Jest
Senior Software Engineer, Atlassian (Jun 2017 - Jul 2019)
- Built the new version of Confluence Cloud and drove it to feature parity with the legacy product while modernizing the codebase and infrastructure.
- Developed developer-experience tooling (CI/CD pipelines, engineering scripts, deployments, testing, and linting) that sped up the team.
Stack: TypeScript, React, Redux, Emotion, Node.js, Express, Cypress, Mocha, Webpack
Software Architect, Amazon Lab126 | Contract (Dec 2016 - Jun 2017)
Leveraging Lessons Learned (L3), AI/ML | AWS
- Architected a centralized cross-organization knowledge platform that pulled documentation, diagrams, video, and other media into a single portal with team-contributed widgets.
- Designed it to head off recurring product-development problems and lower the risk of product recalls across teams.
Stack: TypeScript, Angular, Node.js, Express, Jasmine
Application Engineer, eTouch Systems @ Google | Contract (May 2016 - Dec 2016)
Project management & network inventory tools | GCP
- Developed internal tooling for project management, plus a network-inventory product built on top of Google Maps.
Stack: JavaScript, Angular, Node.js, Express, Jasmine
Senior Software Engineer, Cisco | Contract (Jan 2016 - May 2016)
Multi-cloud deployment management
- Built real-time UI components wired to backend WebSockets that showed the live status of systems and cloud deployments.
Stack: Node.js, Express, Java
Earlier Experience
- UI/UX Architect, Zebra Technologies (Jun 2015 - Jan 2016)
- Development Manager, eBay (Mar 2014 - Jun 2015)
- Senior Software Engineer, eBay (Aug 2011 - Mar 2014)
- Sr. Web Developer, Wells Fargo (Sep 2010 - Aug 2011)
- Software Developer, Cisco (Feb 2007 - Sep 2010)
- Web Developer, Creative Computer Services, Inc. (Nov 2002 - Feb 2007)
- Art Director, Property Pages (Sep 2000 - Nov 2002)
- Graphic Designer, Four Seasons Printing (May 1996 - Jun 2000)
Additional consulting engagements (under NDA) across fintech, media, retail, apparel, industrial IoT, and environmental services, building federated GraphQL supergraphs on AWS.
Education
M.A., Graphic Design Brooks College
B.S., Computer Science Brooks College