Luc Castera

QuickNode

Engineering Manager - QuickNode Marketplace

• Leading the engineering team behind the QuickNode Marketplace.

Bluejay Labs

bluejay.io

Co-Founder

• Designed, implemented, and launched htmlsig.com: a simple tool to create and manage email signatures.
• Grew htmlsig.com as a side-hustle with my co-founder into a solid business generating more than $240,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue, with a team of two.
• Created a tool to more securely share passwords called passpass.co.
• Designed, implemented, and developed businesscards.io: a digital business card solution for iPhone and Android users.

Octopi by Navis

Co-Founder / Director

• Led software development, customer success, and onboarding teams, driving the deployment of our Ruby on Rails application at over 24 cargo ports and terminals globally.
• Drove sales conversations and demonstrations, resulting in over $5M in bookings within two years.
• Actively contributed to the Ruby on Rails codebase, enhancing operational efficiency and customer experience.
• Engaged directly with sales prospects and existing clients to gather requirements for enhancements and new feature development.
• Defined and executed the vision and strategic initiatives for the Octopi by Navis business line.
• Adopted software development methodologies inspired by Basecamp, enhancing team productivity and project management.
• Led a four-person onboarding team, managing complex customer requirements from sale to live software implementation.
• Directed a Customer Success team, ensuring 24/7 support backed by service level agreements (SLAs), maintaining over 99.99% uptime.
• Established KPIs, processes, and best practices for software development, providing transparency through visual dashboards to both Octopi and Navis executive teams.
• Created and distributed sales collateral including marketing one-pagers, videos, a Knowledge Base, and sales decks.
• Coordinated the seamless integration of Octopi into Navis post-acquisition.
• Implemented a reliable on-call support rotation and engineering team, utilizing technologies such as Heroku, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Rails.
• Hired, onboarded, and trained over 15 geographically distributed remote employees, strengthening the organizational structure.
• Provided thought leadership internally and externally, including speaking engagements at conferences and producing videocasts on terminal operations.

Octopi

Co-Founder & CEO

• Founded Octopi, a SaaS Terminal Operating System (TOS) to simplify and streamline port terminal operations, an industry and domain we knew nothing about before starting Octopi.
• Selected as one of the 10 companies to be part of the Venture Hive startup accelerator in Miami, FL.
• Winner of the Early Stage Startup Competition at eMerge Americas 2016.
• Spoke and presented at leading industry conferences in the logistics and port industries.
• Self-learned and implemented SaaS sales best practices that resulted in closed sales of more than $3 million.
• Built the software and the company from $0 of revenue to nearly $1M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) with no outside investments and a team of less than 5 people.
• Managed the company's accounting, software engineering, taxes, sales, customer success, marketing, and human resources.
• Completed and led the successful sale of Octopi to Navis (and Cargotec, their parent company) in March 2019, leading the complex due dilligence process while growing our company's customer base and software.

Intellum

CTO

• Lead the development of Intellum suites of products: Exceed, Tribe Social, The Intellum Platform, SnackerTV, etc...
• Worked with the CEO of Intellum to set the Development Roadmap for the company and to ensure that we complete our milestones on time.
• Communicated regularly with our Client Services team to ensure a close feedback loop between our development team and our customers.
• Managed the relationship between Intellum and some key clients.
• Managed the hiring of software developers, growing the team from a 5 person team to more than 12 software developers.
• Ensured that new employees were onboarded quickly and that software developers were happy and fullfilled at work, by creating a work environment that encouraged autonomy, mastery and purpose.
• Reported the product team's progress to the Intellum leadership team.
• Contributed to the development of Intellum's applications using technologies such as node.js, MongoDB, Backbone.JS, Ruby on Rails, Redis, etc...

Intellum

Software Developer / Entrepreneur

• Designed and implemented an enterprise application platform using a Ruby on Rails stack. The platform was built to mimic an operating system on the web, by providing basic services like managing users, storing, versioning, and sharing documents, communicating via a social network similar to FriendFeed, installing applications from an application catalog, and managing calendar events. The application was also an OpenSocial container using Apache Shindig.
• Used the Lean Startup methodology from Ash Maurya's Running Lean book to find a solution for companies to drive and measure employee performance. Conducted interviews with startup founders, managers, CEOs and Human Resources professionals. Used the knowledge gained from these interviews to propose and implement a solution to the problem.
• Designed and implemented a prototype of a modern Talent Management Systems (TMS) based on our Lean Startup research. The prototype used a Ruby On Rails backend with a Sproutcore frontend. This application was used internally at Intellum to test its stickyness and value.
• Designed and implemented GroupDock: a lightweight enterprise application platform built using node.js. The platform handles Single Sign On and provides a central repository of users with an integration module to integrate with clients' Human Resources systems only once. Applications can be built to work with the platform by simply implementing OAuth and a small adapter API.
• Participated in finding, interviewing, and hiring new software developers to work for Intellum.
• Worked with outsourced software developers and consultants to build Groupdock and the TMS tool, serving as the liaison between them and Intellum.
• Represented Intellum at the Node Summit NodeJam in San Francisco in 2012 by giving a short presentation on Groupdock.js.
• Presented at local software or entrepreneurship meetups, expanding Intellum's brand and reach in the global tech community.
• Designed and implemented Tribe Social: an enterprise social networking tool. Tribe Social allows groups to communicate and share ideas. It is built using node.js, Backbone.js, and MongoDB.
• Open-Sourced grunt-handlebars (a Grunt task to precompile Handlebars templates) and mongoose-nested-set (a mongoose plugin implementing the nested set pattern), and other small tools or code examples.
• Technologies used at Intellum: Ruby On Rails, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Riak, Redis, Resque, Google Closure Tools, jQuery, node.js, Sproutcore, Backbone.js, Express.js, MongoDB, Chef, Capistrano, jqTouch, Socket.IO, Faye, OAuth, Phonegap/Cordova, and more.

Job509.com

Co-Founder

• Co-founded the leading jobs website in Haiti. In just two years, Job509 has built a database with tens of thousands of resumes, has helped thousands of job-seekers to find employment in Haiti, and has built a strong reputation as the place to go when searching for a new employee in Haiti.
• Designed and implemented a job board and Applicant Tracking System to serve the job market in Haiti. The application was designed using Ruby on Rails and MySQL and has received more than 5 million pageviews in it's first 18 months. It receives an average of about 10,000 unique visitors a day.
• Planned and participated in social marketing strategy for Job509 that has allowed the company to receive more than 40,000 likes on Facebook and more than 5000 Twitter followers. In a country with low Internet penetration like Haiti, these are impressive numbers and Job509 is seen as an example of a company that has used Social Networks effectively to build its brand.
• Co-planned Job509's education classes/seminars where we bring foreign trainers and thought leaders to Haiti to teach or discuss an important topics such as Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing.
• Built the event management tool which supports advertising the classes/seminars offered by Job509 on our website and tracking registrations.

ShareMeme Inc.

Founder and CTO

• Raised seed and angel funding rounds from Launchbox Digital and angel investors within 4 months of prototype development.
• Designed and developed sharememe.com and messagepub.com from scratch using Ruby on Rails.
• Administered all the server infrastructure for ShareMeme Inc. including deployments of Ubuntu servers with nginx, Thin, Redis, monit, Postfix, mongrel, etc...
• Managed the online marketing campaign using Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Website Optimizer, StumbleUpon ads, banner ads, conference sponsorships, etc...
• Handled customer support for messagepub.com and sharememe.com.

Verizon Communications

Software Systems Architect

FIOS TV Web Remote

• Lead the development of the Search and Parental Control features of the FIOS TV Web Remote using C#, ASP.NET 2.0, and Javascript (Prototype + Scriptaculous + JSON).
• Proposed and implemented the next generation TV Guide for the FIOS Web Remote using Javascript, Java, AJAX, XSLT, C#, ASP.NET 2.0.
• Coordinated the development efforts between the US-based team and the development team in Chennai, India.

IT Workbench

• Provided customer support for IT Workbench, a central SOA operational infrastructure that houses Verizon's Web Service directory and adds management capabilities to web service publishers and subscribers.
• Helped to manage and support the eBroker portion of ITW which allows Web Services within Verizon to interact with external Web Services.

Supplier Portal / ClliNet

• Lead the development of the following Supplier Portal applications: Diversity Spending Reports, Suppliers Excellence Award, and eReport Card. Technologies used: J2EE, JavaScript, HTML, AJAX.
• Migrated ClliNet servlets from a JRun server to Weblogic 8.1. (ClliNet is an application used by the network technicians to obtain a CLLI code for devices they are installing on the network).
• Developed a ClliNet SOAP logging module in C#.

VSMS / ACE / Outage Analysis Team

• Served as the point of contact between the Outage Analysis Team and the Verizon Service Management System (VSMS) / Alarm Correlation Engine (ACE) team.
• Identified patterns in a crisis database that resulted in outages and programmed the Alarm Correlation Engine to take action when these patterns occurred.
• Deployed Sea Of Green VSMS Java applets and VSMS network-maps for system monitoring.
• Redesigned and improved the ACE administration GUI using Tcl/Tk.

Delphi Electronics & Safety

Engineering Intern

• Drafted extensive documentation on the power mode design of a Toyota car radio.
• Proposed and implemented a method for automating power mode timing measurements for a Toyota radio using C and a NEC V850 microprocessor.

GE Security

Engineering Intern

• Initiated, analyzed, and implemented a plan to manufacture a set of cable assemblies in-house which increased company profits.
• Designed and implemented a cable tester to help reduce defects on the assembly line. The tester was implemented using a Motorola 68HC11 microprocessor and assembly language.

Turbo Systems S.A.

Engineering Intern

• Implemented a tool with C++ and Oracle OCI that automatically loads data from Microsoft Excel files into a database and hence increasing the efficiency of the process.
• Assisted in installing a new Oracle-based payroll software for the National Airport Association and trained their employees to use it.