Asier Marqués
Engineering leadership
Technology strategy · Organizations · Product delivery
Career journey
From systems engineering and entrepreneurship to engineering leadership — and the places I've lived along the way.
- Barakaldo · 1983
-
1983 — 2008
Roots and systems engineering foundations
Born and raised in the Basque Country, where I studied systems administration and started my career: systems administration (specializing in Exchange Servers), consulting and software development in different companies, while building websites as a freelancer on the side.
-
2008 Went freelance as software engineer
-
2008 — 2012
Technology leadership and entrepreneurship
Took on CTO responsibilities for client projects, co-founded Blackslot and started building products, teams and cloud-based hosting solutions for clients with demanding performance and scalability needs.
-
2009 Co-founded Blackslot.com
-
2011 Created artesanio.com, a marketplace for Spain-based crafters and artisans
-
2012 Exited Blackslot S.L. and founded Simettric Internet Technologies S.L.U.
-
2012 Joined as CTO and partner at 4Visions Gestió de Projectes S.L. to build a SaaS product for translators and linguistic professionals
-
2012 Started organizing the BilboStack tech conference
-
2012–2019 Started organizing small meetups in Bilbao and building the ElComité community
- Moved to Sevilla · 2013
-
2013 Started and led the PHP Sevilla community
-
2012 — 2017
Product ownership and SaaS leadership
Product development, SaaS platforms and technical leadership across 4Visions Manager and Simettric, expanding from hands-on software development into product lifecycle management, technical partnerships and business-oriented engineering decisions.
-
2012 4Visions Gestió de Projectes S.L. won the I Concurso de Emprendedores Craft-EFM prize with its 4Visions Manager SaaS product
- Moved to La Rioja · 2016
-
2016 — 2018
Closing an entrepreneurial cycle
Leading SaaS and software development initiatives across my companies — architecture, product strategy and engineering management — through the final years of Simettric and 4Visions, consolidating lessons about product delivery, clients, teams and sustainable software businesses.
- Moved to Barakaldo · 2018
-
2018
Head of Software Architecture
Led software architecture at Grupo Versia, introducing new ways of designing, writing and delivering software: functional programming, data-oriented systems (Akka, Kafka, Gherkin) and team leadership.
- Moved to Madrid · 2019
-
2019 Moved fully into engineering management
-
2019 — 2022
Engineering Manager, then Senior Engineering Manager
Joined Packlink as Engineering Manager and later Senior Engineering Manager, helping grow teams, engineering culture, platform capabilities and management practices.
-
2021 Started a psychology degree at the UOC
-
2022 — 2023
Senior Director of Software Engineering
Led the Packlink Shipping cluster and the Spain engineering hub at Auctane after its acquisition of Packlink, owning organizational design, engineering strategy and budget.
-
2023 Earned a Senior Product Manager certification from Product School
-
2023 — now
Engineering leadership in international teams
At BestSecret Group, leading distributed, international engineering teams that own the production-critical services for the Payments and Checkout domains.
-
2026 Started the MadAI.es AI Engineering community