Edwin N. Gonzales — Engineering Lead, AI-Native Development

01 — What I do

Every shape the same experience takes

More than thirty years across engineering, delivery and teaching means I fit more than one brief. These are the roles where I'd be strongest, and what I'd bring to each.

Engineering lead

I've led engineering in every shape it comes — leading a product team with dedicated QA, serving as lead developer on a distributed team across three time zones, supervising multiple development teams as a CTO, and managing a technical support team while running delivery across concurrent client projects. I own release governance, review every significant pull request — and I'm still the lead developer on the codebase, not a manager who left it behind. Fifteen years as a university IT director and faculty member underneath it all: mentoring isn't an afterthought.

Full-stack & AI engineer

Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL schema and migration design, Flutter and React frontends, and Claude API feature work — structured data, not free text, with the prompt design and output validation that keep AI features honest. Test-first, with CI/CD wired in, and deployed wherever the client runs: AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean or Cloudflare.

Odoo implementation & support

I've worked in the platform continuously since it was called TinyERP — through the OpenERP years, to Odoo 19. Requirements discovery, configuration and custom modules, statutory compliance work, data migration, user support and documentation — and I research what Odoo can do natively before writing code. Techno-functional: comfortable running the discovery workshop and writing the module that comes out of it.

Product owner / delivery

A decade turning policy and business requirements from non-technical stakeholders into scoped, sequenced, delivery-ready work a team can execute without coming back for clarification. Roadmap ownership, backlog shaping against competing priorities, release scope and sign-off, dependency and risk tracking — with enough technical depth to estimate credibly and challenge technical objections. And the newest part of the craft: knowing how requirements have to change when it's AI doing the implementation.

Technical advisor & architect

I advise government stakeholders on enterprise architecture and open-source adoption for digital transformation programmes — auditing solutions for scalability and security, and presenting findings to decision makers who aren't engineers. That work includes serving as a Resource Person & Technical Consultant for the Asian Development Bank.

Educator & capacity builder

Fifteen years of university teaching and mentoring — and I never really stopped: capacity-building workshops for implementing agencies, business-intelligence training, and the documentation and training that let country teams run a national platform independently. Latest: a curriculum-reform guide for teaching programming in the AI era.

02 — Introduction

In my own words

Who I am, what I've built, and how I work — two and a half minutes.

03 — Selected work

An open-source platform for national social programmes

The centrepiece of my work since 2022: OpenSPP, the open-source platform behind social protection programmes in five countries — registry to payments, consent to audit.

OpenSPP — social protection, end to end

I'm both Head of Engineering and lead developer — and the platform's second-largest contributor on GitHub: hundreds of commits and nearly a hundred pull requests across the codebase, most recently hardening its security.

The problem

A government delivering social assistance needs one system that can register citizens, decide who qualifies, deliver cash or goods, hear appeals, and survive an audit — holding some of the most sensitive data a state has, without locking the country into a vendor.

What I build

An open-source platform of 120+ modules: registries, programme and payment management, change requests, consent, grievance handling, mapping, and a FastAPI service layer with OAuth2. I designed and shipped the API, change-request, consent and audit subsystems — and work across all the rest.

The hard part

Nothing here is low-stakes: a missed authorisation check leaks citizen data, a silent edit corrupts who gets paid. So access rules are enforced at the record layer, changes are attributable in a tamper-resistant audit trail, and corrections go through a reviewed change-request workflow — never applied silently. My latest work is security hardening across the platform.

The result

Running in five countries, below. A verified Digital Public Good — and the Philippines' social welfare department has named OpenSPP as it prepares the rollout for its national 4Ps programme. Virtually every module carries its own test suite, run in CI.

See it working Read the source About OpenSPP

Python FastAPI PostgreSQL OAuth2 Odoo Docker CI/CD

Philippines

DSWD 4Ps — the national conditional cash transfer programme

Sri Lanka

National farmer registry

Laos

National farmer registry

Togo

National social registry

Iraq

Public Distribution System

04 — How I work

Ownership, tests, and AI that gets checked

What you get if you hire me, described honestly.

End to end

I take a loosely defined problem through discovery, plan, build, test and release — with edge cases and risks made explicit up front. I don't need a finished ticket to start.

Test-first

Unit and integration suites written alongside the feature, not after it — gated in CI with static analysis and security scanning, and validated on staging before go-live.

Stakeholder-facing

I translate policy and business requirements into specifications developers can build against — saying no when the ask is wrong, and renegotiating scope when priorities shift mid-delivery.

Still hands-on

I lead engineering and I write production code. Estimates and architecture calls hold up because I'm in the codebase.

Release discipline

Branching strategy, pull request standards, release scope and sign-off, release notes, versioning and upgrade paths across multiple deployment environments.

I write things down

Configuration and workflow documentation, user guides, training material and video walkthroughs — so teams can operate what I build without me.

Data you can trust

Record-level audit logging, data imports and exports, migration validation, and reconciliation across systems — because an ERP is only as good as the data in it.

Support, not handover

I stay with what I ship: first-line and escalation support, troubleshooting workflow issues, diagnosing performance problems, and guiding users through changes — often as the client's single technical point of contact.

AI tools I use daily

Claude Code is my primary development environment — planning, implementation, refactoring and documentation. Cursor for in-editor work. I've also designed a Claude API product feature — structured configuration that downstream code consumes, not free text — and deliberately didn't ship it: the design review is where an LLM has to earn its place, and that call is written down in an architecture decision record.

The part that matters isn't the tooling — it's the discipline around it. I rolled AI-assisted development out to a working team, which meant deciding what has to change: scoped prompts, project rules, disciplined diff review, and validation before merge. AI raises the bar on specification quality — vague requirements produce confidently wrong code, quickly. Output gets checked, not trusted. And it isn't just code: requirements drafting, documentation, test-case preparation and planning all run AI-assisted, under the same validation standards. With that discipline in place, my team cut feature delivery time by 70% and took review turnaround from three days to one.

05 — Experience

What I've shipped

Since 1993, most recent first.

2025 — present

Head of Engineering & Lead Developer

OpenSPP

I lead a team of 5 developers and 2 QA engineers and work hands-on across all 120+ modules of the platform, deployed in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Laos, Togo and Iraq.
Own the technical roadmap, release scope, and governance; review every significant pull request.
Designed and shipped the v2 API layer, change-request workflow, consent and audit subsystems.
Introduced AI-assisted development across the team, with the review standards to keep it safe.

2025 — present

Resource Person & Technical Consultant

Asian Development Bank

Advise government stakeholders on enterprise architecture and open-source adoption for digital transformation programmes.
Audit technical solutions for scalability and security, presenting findings to non-technical decision makers; deliver capacity-building workshops to implementing agencies.

2010 — present

Founder & Principal Engineer

Pith Technologies

My client engineering practice — part-time alongside my full-time roles, full-time in the stretches between them — taking engagements from a loose problem statement to a running production system, with direct accountability to business owners.
Usually the only engineer on an engagement: architecture, full-stack build, cloud deployment, ongoing support, and the client's single technical point of contact.
Delivered a full Odoo 19 production system on AWS for a US garment manufacturing and retail client — EC2, Aurora PostgreSQL, CloudFront, WAF, CI/CD — and still maintain it.
Built multi-channel sales consolidation with Shopify integration and REST ingestion from external retail systems.
Full-stack systems for education, healthcare and commerce clients, including a custom real-estate CRM.
Customised Odoo accounting for Philippine BIR accreditation; introduced QA processes and documentation standards while managing a technical support team across concurrent projects.

2022 — 2025

OpenSPP Lead Developer

Newlogic, Inc.

Lead developer on the same platform before it moved under OpenSPP — building modules across the codebase, not a single area.
Owned release management, CI/CD and code quality for national-scale deployments, working with a distributed team of 8 developers across 3 time zones; reviewed pull requests daily while remaining the top individual contributor to core modules.
Guided project managers, product owners and architects from incomplete requirements to buildable work.

2013 — 2014

Chief Technology Officer

Electronics Health Records International

Led development of a Hospital Information System and EMR, supervising multiple development teams and setting product strategy.
Designed interoperability with national health systems and insurer integrations.
Advised the board and management committees on technical direction and trade-offs.

1995 — 2010

Director, Computing & Information Systems / Faculty

Saint Mary's University

Directed university-wide IT infrastructure, data communications, systems development and security — including digital transformation initiatives — for fifteen years.
Taught and mentored undergraduate and graduate students; presented research internationally.
Delivered business intelligence training (Pentaho) covering ETL, data modelling and reporting.

1993 — 1995

Instructor

Central Luzon State University — Computer Training Center

Taught programming and built the training centre's information system.

06 — Also built

Other things I've shipped — and what's in the works

Shorter versions, in case one of them is closer to what you need.

Made-to-measure configurator

Tablet-first React web app for a retail client with a live, layered-2D suit preview — fabrics clipped to cloth masks in real time — on a FastAPI and Odoo backend with S3 and CloudFront asset delivery. Designed a Claude API style concierge for it, then shipped a deterministic rules engine first — the trade-off documented in an architecture decision record. Led the architecture, including the system-of-record decision between the storefront and the ERP. React · FastAPI · Odoo · AWS

Multi-channel sales dashboard

Consolidated daily sales for a multi-store retail group: REST ingestion with hashed per-shop API keys and rate limiting, plus a Shopify sync built so one broken store can never block the rest — and dashboards that never sum across currencies. Replaced channel-by-channel manual reporting. Python · Shopify API · PostgreSQL

Odoo 19 on AWS

Production deployment for a US garment manufacturing and retail client — it runs their production workflows across multiple product lines on one rule: nothing moves without a sign-off. Fifty-two gated workflow steps with SLA escalations, barcode and RFID traceability with every unit scanned before shipment, and a Flutter mobile app whose offline outbox keeps the factory floor working when the connection doesn't. EC2, Aurora PostgreSQL, CloudFront, WAF, multi-repo deployment automation, CI/CD. Requirements through go-live, and still supporting it. AWS · Odoo · Flutter · CI/CD

Odoo accounting for BIR

Customised Odoo accounting to meet Philippine Bureau of Internal Revenue accreditation requirements — statutory reporting rules worked through with the client's finance team and documented for audit. Odoo · Statutory compliance

Custom CRM

Designed and built a CRM for a real estate client: lead and pipeline workflow, contact and property relationships, and activity tracking — specified directly with the business owner rather than handed over as a spec. CRM · Requirements & build

Hospital information system

Led development of an HIS and EMR with interoperability into national health systems and insurer integrations — high-consequence data flows where the failure cases drove the architecture. Healthcare · Interoperability

MOODLE@SMU

University-wide rollout of an open-source learning management system, published as research and presented at conferences in Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Macau. Open source · Published research

Student information system

Building a compliance-first foundation for Philippine universities: nine modules mapping the Data Privacy Act, Free Tuition Law and CHED standards straight into the data model, with field-level encryption for government IDs and 250+ automated tests. Odoo · In development

Health records platform

Building an EMR foundation around a standards-based FHIR interoperability layer — integration-tested in CI against a live FHIR server — with Philippine national-ID and PhilHealth support built in from the start. Odoo · FHIR · In development

Open asset management system

Designed a fifteen-plus-module architecture for asset lifecycle, inventory, maintenance and audit campaigns — specified end to end in fourteen architecture decision records, with the foundation modules implemented. Odoo · Architecture

07 — Stack

The full stack, in detail

The complete list, for anyone matching against a specification.

Backend

Python, FastAPI, REST API design, async patterns, OAuth2 and PKCE, microservices, FHIR/HL7, Node.js, Odoo and ORM design, PHP, Java, C++. C#/.NET in production earlier in my career — currently refreshing on modern .NET.

Frontend

React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, OWL, progressive web apps, and offline-first Flutter/Dart mobile work with push notifications.

Odoo

Custom fields and models, workflows and automated actions, email templates, QWeb PDF reports and forms, saved searches and filters, access rights and record rules, scheduled and server actions, data migration, the Odoo test framework, Shopify and payment/messaging integrations, OCA modules, Flectra.

Data

PostgreSQL — schema design, migrations, query profiling, star-schema report design. Field-level encryption with searchable blind indexes. Aurora, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite. Metabase, Superset, Pentaho, ETL workflows.

Cloud & infrastructure

AWS (EC2, Aurora, S3, CloudFront, WAF, CloudWatch, SES, IAM), Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, Linux administration, load balancing, GitHub Actions and CI/CD.

Networks & hardware

Asterisk, FreePBX, UniFi Talk with SIP, VPN configuration, network routing and security, structured cabling, Raspberry Pi, Arduino.

AI engineering

Claude Code, Cursor, Claude API integration, structured-output prompting and validation, AI-assisted refactoring and review, guardrails and review standards for AI-generated code — and Claude Code-native repo tooling: subagents, hooks and path-scoped rules set up per project.

Delivery & product

Requirements gathering and stakeholder discovery, business process analysis, user stories and acceptance criteria, vertical slicing, backlog shaping, sprint cadence, roadmap ownership, release management, dependency and risk tracking. Jira, GitHub Projects, Slack, Google Workspace.

Quality

Test-driven development, unit and integration testing, CI-gated test runs, code review standards, static analysis, security scanning in CI — secrets, dependencies and code — architecture decision records, staging and UAT validation.

08 — Background

Education, speaking & affiliations

The credentials behind the claims — each one checkable.

Published & presented

Keynote speaker at PyCon APAC 2025 — "Haligi of Change: Python for Positive Impact and Innovation in APAC's Digital Public Infrastructure & DPGs" (co-presented, opening slot).
Presented in the Digital Convergence Initiative's "Interoperability in Action" series (2026) — demonstrating OpenSPP working with QGIS and WFP's PRISM for early-warning-driven social protection, alongside speakers from WFP, GIZ and Google.
Exhibited OpenSPP at the Global DPI Summit 2025 in Cape Town and at ADB's Asia Pacific Digital Transformation Forum 2025.
Research on open-source LMS adoption, presented in Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Macau; research on open-source ERP, presented at an international conference in the Philippines.

Education

MSc Information TechnologyPolytechnic University of the Philippines, 2009

BSc Computer ScienceAMA University, Quezon City, 1993

Affiliation

National Board of Trustees, Philippine Society of IT Educators, 2006–2009.

Languages

English — full professional proficiency, written and spoken. Filipino — native.