Miguel Cazares

Senior iOS Engineer - 14+ yrs native iOS · React Native, Android · architecture, performance, releases · team lead 2019-2025

Email: [email protected]
Website: https://miguelengineer.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cazaresm/
GitHub: https://github.com/cazares
Phone: (830) 734-3376

Builds native iOS apps from the ground up and runs them in production at scale - 78k monthly active users at ShipStation, architecture set across teams, releases owned end to end, and a 3-engineer team led from 2020 to 2025; React Native and Android in range

Core Skills

• Native iOS - Swift, Objective-C, Xcode, Instruments, iOS SDK, UIKit, AVFoundation, concurrency and multithreading (GCD), APNs push notifications
• React Native and Android - JavaScript, Java, Expo, native modules and two-way bridges, CodePush OTA, FCM push notifications
• Mobile architecture & performance - native vs cross-platform tradeoff calls, mobile-API contract design, offline peer-to-peer sync over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, Instruments-driven startup, memory, and battery-life optimization
• Release engineering, CI/CD & testing - Fastlane, TestFlight, staged rollouts, LaunchDarkly feature flags, GitHub Actions, Veracode SAST/SCA gates; XCTest, Appium, BrowserStack, TDD, mutation-tested suites
• Technical & team leadership - architecture reviews, code review, coding standards, pair programming, mentoring senior and mid-level engineers, Agile/Scrum; AI-assisted development under written standards and automated guardrails
• Backend, distributed systems & observability - consolidated Node push service (APNs + FCM, queue-driven), Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, GCP, REST APIs, Auth0; Crashlytics, Sentry, New Relic, Segment, Pendo, Mixpanel, PagerDuty

Work Experience

CAZARES SOFTWARE LLC

Founder / Mobile Architect | Aug 2025 - Present

• Signo Vivo - iOS app live in the App Store, built solo: custom Swift sync modules (MultipeerConnectivity, CoreBluetooth) under a React Native shell keep the choir's 15 iPads in sync over a local Wi-Fi/Bluetooth mesh with zero-touch UX; the signovivo.com companion serves 50+ congregants twice weekly
• Mixterious - fully automated audio/video pipeline on GCP with a self-healing QA stage (OCR and speech recognition verify every render) - 1,800+ published videos

SHIPSTATION

Feb 2015 - Jul 2025

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead (promoted) | Jan 2019 - Jul 2025

• ShipStation's data science team measured the mobile apps at an estimated $2.2M/yr in business value - web-plus-mobile users churned roughly 82-83% less than web-only
• Sole contributor to the ShipStation iOS codebase for 10 years and 3 months - authored every commit, evolving it in place with no from-scratch rewrite while the web app was rewritten twice
• Led and mentored a 3-engineer iOS/Android team from 2020 to 2025, reporting directly to the VP of Engineering - wrote the coding standards, ran code review, mentored senior and mid-level engineers, and directed mobile-API architecture reviews with two VPs
• Designed the React Native architecture for Stamps.com Mobile and trained its offshore team on CodePush and Fastlane; inherited the app when their contract lapsed and extended it with two-way native printing bridges
• Introduced React Native in 2017 to cover two platforms with one developer, then reversed that call around 2021-2022 when the tradeoff flipped and deintegrated it back to native
• Owned the consolidated push-notification backend - a queue-driven Node service handling APNs and FCM - re-architected push across backend, iOS, and Android in 3 phased deploys with zero incidents, then completed the FCM v1 migration ahead of Google's cutoff
• Architected for scale and stability: 78k monthly active users (58k iOS, 20k Android) at 12M+ monthly screen views on iOS and 4M+ on Android, >99.99% crash-free on iOS and 99.84% on Android, 0 after-hours deployment incidents from 2020 to 2025 via staged rollouts and PagerDuty monitoring
• Boosted iOS from 2.5 to 4.7 stars (6k+ ratings) and held it six years - credited by the VP of Engineering; drove Android from 2.5 to 4.3 stars
• Identified and closed a critical Auth0 security failure mode absorbing 10M+ malicious login attempts/week - an estimated $1.5M+ in account-takeover losses prevented
• Owned iOS and Android release engineering end to end - Fastlane, TestFlight, staged rollouts, LaunchDarkly flags, CodePush OTA - and introduced unit, integration, and end-to-end testing with TDD
• Cut the Android app download from 125 MB to 27 MB (78% smaller) and sped up cold-start/login 45-85% across four ShipStation and Stamps.com Mobile apps via startup concurrency

Software Engineer (Part-Time Contract) | Apr 2018 - Jan 2019

• Improved Android crash-free rate from 80.2% to 97.6% in under 6 months
• Won a separate fixed-scope contract to ship natural-language address entry on both platforms - speak or paste any address and the app parses and corrects it - delivered in 3 weeks against a 30-day contract

Software Engineer | Feb 2015 - Feb 2018

• Built the ShipStation iOS app from zero to production in 4 weeks - shared Android with the co-founder for 3 months, then sole on both platforms

WAYBETTER

Senior Mobile Engineer (concurrent with ShipStation contract) | Feb 2018 - Nov 2018

• Named Interim Mobile Team Lead for 5 months at a startup of fewer than 30 people and flown to the New York City headquarters to present to the entire company, CEO, CTO, and COO included

EAGLE EYE NETWORKS

iOS Mobile App Developer | Feb 2014 - Feb 2015

• Sole engineer on the iOS video-surveillance app at a sub-10-person startup - cut video start time from 5,600 ms to 72 ms (nearly 80x faster) and battery drain ~40% before a major industry conference

SPEAKWRITE

Software Engineer | Dec 2011 - Feb 2014

• Sole iOS + Android engineer for secure dictation apps, plus full-stack work; cut push-to-stage deploys from more than 10 minutes to under 1

Education

B.S. Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude, Mathematics Minor - Texas State University, Dec 2011