Santiago Fernández de Valderrama
Applied AI Operator
Spanish tech entrepreneur with 16+ years building products. Founded and exited a phone repair business (2009–2025), where he automated to 90% self-service before selling. Currently Head of Applied AI at Zinkee.
career-ops emerged from his own AI-era job search in early 2026 — 740 listings evaluated, one Head of Applied AI role landed. He open-sourced it under MIT when he no longer needed it. An extended case study — timeline, metrics, decisions — lives at santifer.io/career-ops.
Featured in Business Insider and WIRED Greece. Teaching Fellow at the AI Product Academy (Maven, with Dr. Marily Nika of Google).
For Santiago’s other work and technical writing, see santifer.io.
Stack
TypeScript + Python + Go for production systems. Multi-agent orchestration via Claude Code (5+ parallel agents, IPC via JSON, Haiku-summarized memory). Airtable as headless CMS. n8n for visual workflows. Langfuse for LLMOps observability. Supabase pgvector for agentic RAG.
Convictions
HITL by default for critical decisions. MIT-only for OSS. Local-first when ergonomic. Evals as production gates. No vendor lock-in design.
Press
- Business Insider — How I built a tool to filter job listings — and landed Head of AI
- Business Insider Deutschland — Mein KI-Tool scannt 700 Job-Anzeigen — so half es mir, Karriere zu machen
- WIRED Greece — Το AI εργαλείο που φέρνει επανάσταση στον τρόπο που ψάχνουμε δουλειά
- Create OS Lounge — Conversation with Eric — career-ops origins, multi-agent orchestration
- Diario de Sevilla — Salir de compras en busca de la solución exprés del teléfono
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