Yhensel Benítez

B.Sc. in Computer Science

2025 – Present

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona

Resuming the degree I started years ago — combining a decade of hands-on engineering experience with formal computer science foundations to deepen my expertise and finish what I set out to do.

Computer Science Studies

2013 – 2015

Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona

Paused for personal reasons. The knowledge gained here laid the groundwork for my career and motivated me to return to complete the degree.

Higher Ed. Certificate in Web Application Development (EQF Level 5)

2013 – 2014

Stucom, Barcelona

Higher Ed. Certificate in Network Systems Administration (EQF Level 5)

2010 – 2012

Salesians Sarrià, Barcelona

Senior Backend Engineer

Dec 2023 – Present

Stay — Madrid, Spain (Remote from Barcelona)

Part of the backend team building the hospitality platform powering hotel integrations, real-time analytics, and guest-facing features across multiple hotel chains.

• Designed DDD-based backend services with clean bounded contexts, enabling independent team scaling and faster feature delivery.
• Integrated multiple hotel chain APIs for the 360 project — unlocking fast-booking, loyalty programs, and Wallet features for end users.
• Built real-time analytics pipelines with Tinybird, processing high-throughput event data through optimized schemas and dimension tables.
• Deployed observability infrastructure (Grafana, Loki, OpenSearch) — cutting incident response times and giving the team full production visibility.
• Led refactoring of legacy Doctrine mappings, standardizing API responses and eliminating inconsistencies across services.

Senior Backend Engineer

Mar 2023 – Dec 2023

GoTrendier — Barcelona, Spain

Powered search and product features for a second-hand fashion marketplace serving 7M+ products and ~2M users across Mexico and Colombia, in a lean 3-person engineering team.

• Owned the search system end-to-end — tuning relevance, ranking, and query performance at scale across millions of listings.
• Built a product validation and moderation tool that improved content quality and platform trust.
• Shipped features autonomously from requirements analysis through production deployment, collaborating directly with product and design.

Backend Engineer (Mid → Senior)

2018 – 2023

Zinio — Barcelona, Spain

Core member of a 3–5 person team building the content ingestion pipeline for a B2C digital magazine platform, serving major publishers including Meredith (People, InStyle, Food&Wine).

• Drove the migration from a legacy monolith to a microservices architecture, improving deployment independence and system scalability.
• Designed DDD-based backend services powering a high-volume content pipeline processing thousands of magazine issues.
• Implemented async messaging with RabbitMQ, decoupling services and increasing reliability under peak loads.
• Built observability infrastructure (Kibana, CloudWatch, Sentry) with custom metrics — enabling proactive incident detection and faster resolution.
• Shipped features end-to-end and partnered with the Product Owner on technical proposals and estimation.

Junior Developer

2017 – 2018

Atabix — Barcelona, Spain

Contributed to a full redesign of an internal management tool for 2theloo (washroom management in large commercial spaces). Built features for store collections, employee management, and company billing in a 3-person team.

Junior Developer

2016 – 2017

AT Sistemas — Jerez de la Frontera, Spain

Built a bridge application to automate hotel reservation and rate transfers between systems — converting SOAP payloads to a JSON API, with RabbitMQ for queuing and Memcache for caching. Included a 3-month on-site rotation abroad.