Javier Piedra | Founder and software engineer

About

My path into software started with business problems. I studied Business Administration and worked in business strategy, marketing, and operations before moving into engineering. Building the technology myself allowed me to carry a business idea through to the product and the systems behind it.

That combination has shaped my work across consulting, entrepreneurship, and engineering leadership. Today, I co-lead Awra's vision and product direction with Luis and develop most of its technology. I stay involved in both the commercial decisions and the engineering required to put them into practice.

Current work

Co-founder

Awra

Awra is a technology company working to simplify how people interact with medical, pharmacy, and diagnostic services, while developing tools to support the daily work of the teams that provide them.

Our starting point was Farmacia Coyoacán, an independent pharmacy in Mexico City. Working on its e-commerce operation and connecting inventory with digital sales channels led us to recognize similar needs in other pharmacies. That work developed into Farmacias de Barrio, Awra's business serving independent pharmacies through software for catalogues, inventory, orders, and sales channels.

Luis and I lead Awra together, sharing responsibility for the company's vision and product direction. Alongside those responsibilities, I design and develop most of our products and underlying technology. My involvement extends from deciding what a product needs to accomplish to implementing the systems that make it work.

Awra's commerce site: awra.mx

Tech Lead

Good Ancestor

At Good Ancestor, I lead engineering on AI-powered products, combining system architecture with hands-on development. My work spans multi-agent orchestration and retrieval-augmented generation, bringing together embedding-based search, lexical retrieval, and cross-encoder reranking to supply language models with relevant context.

I also develop integrations across cloud model providers and self-hosted inference, with shared interfaces for model selection, routing, and structured generation. Beyond integrating models, my work addresses how these systems behave in operation: evaluating outputs, tracking usage and costs, enforcing execution budgets, and recovering from failures without discarding completed work.

Technical notes

Web applications

I work on interfaces, APIs, and databases using TypeScript, React, Django, Rails, and PostgreSQL.

Information systems

I've built systems that bring together information from multiple sources and support search, retrieval, and human review.

Selected experience

PPDC

Co-founder

Luis and I co-founded PPDC to work with businesses on strategy, marketing, and technology. We shared leadership of the team, while my responsibilities encompassed business and marketing strategy, software development, and the delivery of technology projects.

The work connected advisory responsibilities with direct implementation: developing recommendations with clients and building the tools to put them into practice.

Consulting is no longer our primary activity, although we continue to take on occasional client projects.

Pipas Las Tres

Business development and engineering

At Pipas Las Tres, I developed the business model and built a custom platform combining e-commerce with internal business management. I developed both the frontend and backend, alongside responsibilities in marketing and operational coordination.

The project brought business development and engineering into the same context: I was building software for a business whose model and operations I also helped shape.

In 2023, we sold the brand and commercial assets. The transaction did not include the software platform.

Honest Policy

Worked on insurance software, including frontend features, Rails applications, and QA practices.

Bratdev

Built web and mobile features for a fintech team using Django, React, React Native, and GraphQL.

Contact

You can reach me on LinkedIn and explore my technical work on GitHub.

LinkedIn GitHub