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Giovanni Alvarez

Giovanni Alvarez

Forward Deployed Engineer · Enterprise Integrations · Customer-Facing Delivery

Work authorization: Authorized to work in the United States for any employer
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Professional Summary

Customer-facing engineer and technical architect who turns ambiguous enterprise requirements into deployed production systems. Experienced across technical discovery, proofs of concept, executive demonstrations, solution architecture, enterprise integrations, implementation, and production ownership. Built an enterprise hospitality platform adopted as a brand standard by Hilton, Starwood, and Taj; consolidated 35+ legacy systems; and operated high-concurrency AWS infrastructure serving millions of daily API and IoT requests. Brings the communication range to work directly with customer executives and engineers while remaining hands-on in application code, data, integrations, and cloud operations.

Forward Deployed Engineering Strengths

Professional Experience

Career History

Founding Engineer & Technical Lead

April 2016 – July 2026
KYC Hospitality
  • Served as sole founding engineer and primary technical partner to the CEO, owning customer discovery, solution architecture, demonstrations, implementation, and production delivery for an enterprise hospitality SaaS platform.
  • Helped establish the platform as a brand standard for Hilton, Starwood, and Taj by acting as the technical authority in executive sales cycles, translating operational needs into credible demonstrations and deployment plans.
  • Led discovery sessions and rapidly built proofs of concept for automated room assignment, task dispatching, guest messaging, and white-labeled guest applications; successful concepts became reusable product modules.
  • Architected and delivered a unified platform that replaced 35+ fragmented point solutions, reducing integration complexity, software sprawl, operational overhead, and cross-system failure points.
  • Built real-time, bidirectional integration pipelines for Oracle Opera FIAS/OXI, Infor HMS/HTNG, and FOSSE/VBScript, bridging modern SaaS workflows with legacy property-management environments.
  • Re-engineered third-party vendor configuration and testing workflows, reducing onboarding from a 24-hour integration cycle to an automated, immediate process.
  • Operated and optimized AWS, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, queues, and IoT integrations supporting millions of daily requests while maintaining a sub-500 ms latency SLA.
  • Engineered a Global Guest Dossier that reconciled cross-property identifier collisions and enabled synchronized guest profiles across otherwise isolated customer databases.

Tier 2 Client Services Engineer, Post-Acquisition Integration

April 2017 – June 2018
SAP, Gigya Business Unit
  • Provided customer-facing support engineering and integration consulting for high-value enterprise accounts following SAP’s acquisition of Gigya.
  • Functioned across Solutions Engineering, implementation consulting, and technical escalation, advising customers on custom CIAM integrations, data architecture, and security practices.
  • Entered unfamiliar customer codebases across varied technology stacks to identify integration defects, isolate root causes, and restore critical identity workflows.
  • Built and maintained Android, iOS, JavaScript, and PHP demonstration applications used by global sales teams and client architects to validate identity-orchestration scenarios.
  • Facilitated post-acquisition knowledge transfer between Gigya specialists and SAP stakeholders while standardizing internal support resources and client-facing API documentation.

Professional Services Engineer

July 2014 – April 2017
Gigya
  • Consulted Fortune 500 companies and global media organizations on customer identity architecture, authentication standards, data strategy, and implementation planning.
  • Managed technical relationships and architecture strategy for accounts including Formula 1, BBC, Forbes, The Guardian, KLM, Turner, and Scripps Networks.
  • Led discovery and architecture sessions with customer engineering leaders covering OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SSO, privacy requirements, and customer-profile data design.
  • Served as the technical liaison among client engineering teams, account management, product management, and internal engineering to resolve tradeoffs and keep deployments moving.
  • Developed reference applications, SDK extensions, and reusable integration patterns across Objective-C/iOS, Android, JavaScript, and PHP to accelerate enterprise onboarding.

Senior Software Engineer

February 2013 – July 2014
AVRS
  • Architected and ported frontend and backend modules during the modernization of a California DMV registration-services platform into a single-page application.
  • Coordinated engineering, operations, and marketing stakeholders to clarify requirements, remove delivery blockers, and support feature adoption.
  • Introduced CasperJS automated testing, code-review standards, and Git/SVN workflows to reduce regression risk during rapid releases.

Senior Software Engineer

January 2012 – February 2013
StopTheHacker Inc., acquired by Cloudflare
  • Redesigned and developed the primary customer dashboard, improving onboarding and making security and subscription workflows easier to operate.
  • Built the core internationalization layer and launched German localization to support global expansion.
  • Integrated SendGrid account alerts and built website-availability and load-performance monitoring tools for customer-facing operations.

Co-Founder, Lead Developer & Technical Consultant

September 2007 – December 2011
Dynamic Duo Designs / CodeMonkeyG
  • Co-founded a development consultancy that delivered custom applications, commerce systems, and digital strategy for more than 100 clients worldwide.
  • Led customer discovery, architecture, development, delivery, and support for tailored PHP, CodeIgniter, MySQL, JavaScript, and REST API solutions.

Technical Skills

Customer and solution delivery: Technical discovery, requirements clarification, workflow mapping, solution architecture, proofs of concept, technical demonstrations, implementation planning, executive communication, sales enablement, documentation
Integrations and identity: REST APIs, OpenAPI, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SSO, CIAM, Oracle Opera FIAS/OXI, Infor HMS/HTNG, FOSSE, IoT integrations
Application engineering: PHP, Laravel, Vue.js, JavaScript, CodeIgniter, SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, queue-backed processing
Cloud and operations: AWS, Docker, NGINX, API performance optimization, incident troubleshooting, integration testing, production support
Additional platforms: Android, iOS/Objective-C, SendGrid, Salesforce, WordPress, Drupal

Education

Miami Dade College — College coursework