Alejandro Sanabria

Engineering Manager · Mobile Platform Leader · AI-Augmented Execution

About

Engineering Manager who stays technical. 8+ years shipping mobile platforms end-to-end. Now building with LLMs and autonomous agents — designing workflows that change how teams engineer, not just what they ship.

I've driven growth engineering and experimentation at scale, connecting architecture decisions to revenue and product outcomes.

The Arc

I've spent most of my career at Platzi, and each phase taught me something different about how software gets built.

Joined as the second mobile engineer. Small team, big product, everything to figure out. That's where I learned Swift and SwiftUI deeply — and where I learned that quality isn't the opposite of speed; it's what makes speed sustainable.

Then the platform outgrew its stack. I was part of the team that migrated from React Native to fully native apps — Swift on iOS, Kotlin on Android. Working across all three paradigms taught me what each approach actually costs and where each one breaks.

The migration wasn't about picking a side. It was about understanding the trade-offs deeply enough to make the right call for the product.

Leadership came next. Not away from engineering — deeper into it. Helped scale the mobile platform across both iOS and Android, and pushed to turn technical debt reduction from a wish list into a discipline.

Now I'm investing heavily in AI — not as a side interest, but as the next evolution of how I lead.

How I Lead

The two sides aren't separate. The best technical decisions come from understanding your team, and the best teams are built around clear technical vision.

Technical Side

  • Helped design streaming and dynamic content architectures at scale
  • Contributed to internal libraries shared across the mobile platform
  • Helped define guardrails that keep both iOS and Android codebases healthy
  • Shipped on-device AI features with Apple Foundation Models alongside my team
  • The mobile team I helped build was recognized by Apple as an innovation example for Platzi
  • Architectural judgment across React Native, Swift, and Kotlin — not locked to one platform

People Side

  • Helped scale and structure mobile teams across iOS and Android
  • Mentored engineers through career transitions with high standards
  • Shaped a review culture with the team where quality is the norm, not the exception

Android scope: I lead it directly — shared architecture decisions, critical unblocking, and unified execution standards. iOS and Android move as one team, not two silos.

What I'm Building Now

AI is the biggest shift in how engineering work gets done since version control. I'm not waiting to see how it plays out.

As an EM, I use AI to compress feedback loops, reuse context, and raise execution quality. As a builder, I'm going deeper:

Agentic coding Architecture exploration, rapid prototyping, shipping faster
LLM pipelines Automating repetitive engineering work end-to-end
Agent design Multi-step execution with validation, handoffs, and recovery
Skill systems Reusable prompt architectures that encode team knowledge

This isn't experimentation. It's how engineering teams will operate — and the managers who understand it deeply will build the strongest teams.

What I Believe

  • Quality is a multiplier, not a tax. Investing in architecture pays back in velocity every sprint.
  • Lead from the code, not above it. An EM who can't evaluate a technical trade-off is managing blind.
  • AI augments judgment, it doesn't replace it. The goal is better engineering, not just faster output.

Tech

Swift iOS Kotlin Android React Native Claude Code Git