Yhensel Benítez

B.Sc. in Computer Science

2025 – Present

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona

After a decade of hands-on engineering, I'm completing my CS degree to formalize the theoretical foundations — algorithms, distributed systems theory, and software engineering — that complement my production experience.

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.

• Architect DDD-based backend services (PHP/Symfony) with clean bounded contexts, enabling 3 independent squads to ship features in parallel and reducing cross-team dependencies by ~40%.
• Integrate multiple hotel chain REST APIs for the 360 project — unlocking fast-booking, loyalty programs, and Wallet features serving thousands of daily transactions.
• Build real-time analytics pipelines with Kafka and Tinybird, processing 500K+ daily events through optimized schemas and dimension tables.
• Deploy and maintain full observability stack (Grafana, Loki, OpenSearch) — reducing mean incident response time from hours to under 15 minutes.
• Drive refactoring of legacy Doctrine ORM mappings, standardizing REST API responses and eliminating data inconsistencies across 10+ microservices.

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 Elasticsearch-powered search system end-to-end — improving search relevance by 30% and reducing p95 query latency to <200ms across 7M+ 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 PHP monolith to a microservices architecture (Symfony, Docker, AWS), improving deployment frequency from monthly to weekly releases.
• Designed DDD-based backend services powering a high-volume content pipeline processing 10K+ magazine issues/month for publishers like Meredith (People, InStyle).
• Implemented event-driven messaging with RabbitMQ, decoupling 8+ services and achieving 99.9% message delivery 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.