Isamu Ybarra

Senior Engineering Manager | AI Product Engineering | Cloud Architecture

Dallas, TX Remote / Hybrid isamu.ybarra@gmail.com (469) 939-6858 LinkedIn

Summary

Built and operated customer-facing SaaS and AI products across founding teams, two acquisitions, and enterprise platforms serving millions of daily users. Grew and led multiple Scrum teams with up to 12 direct reports and mentored multiple engineers into Senior and Lead Engineer roles. Now lead product strategy and roadmap, engineering, customer delivery, and production operations for an AI-powered K-12 platform that cuts enrollment teams' application-processing workload by 80% through automated document review.

Experience

Edulyze

Head of Engineering / Founding Team

Oct 2024 - PresentRemote

Building a K-12 enrollment operations platform and leading engineering strategy, product delivery, customer implementations, and AI initiatives.

Technologies: C#, .NET, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React, OpenAI, Gemini, AWS/CDK, RDS, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, CloudWatch, VPC, WAF, KMS, ECR, CloudFront, GCP, Azure

PowerSchool

Engineering Manager

Oct 2020 - Oct 2024Remote

Joined as tech lead on Schoology, PowerSchool's learning management system (LMS), serving millions of daily users, and was promoted to engineering manager within 10 months.

  • More than doubled a globally distributed engineering organization from 5 to 12 across two Scrum teams in the US and India, hiring 5 and mentoring multiple engineers into Senior and Lead Engineer roles.
  • Led PowerBuddy AI integrations adopted by 50+ beta customers and used as a strategic sales driver in closing a major enterprise agreement with a 100K+ student district.
  • Led delivery of Annotation Assignments, growing adoption to nearly 2 million assignments created.
  • Owned on-call rotations and incident response for Schoology, serving millions of daily users against a 99.9% SLA; sustained 99.95% uptime through peak back-to-school demand and broadened coverage by adding engineers to the on-call rotation.
  • Prioritized API modernization with Product alongside feature delivery, then led the architecture and rollout while co-architecting and building with a Principal Architect; reduced database load by 30% and p95 response times by 45%, saving thousands of dollars per month.
  • Aligned performance management, compensation planning, promotions, organizational design, and staffing to product priorities, helping sustain 95% voluntary retention across multiple Scrum teams.

Technologies: PHP, TypeScript, React, AWS, MySQL, Serverless, Kubernetes (K8s), Datadog, New Relic, Sentry

Hoonuit (acquired by PowerSchool)

Product & Engineering Manager and Tech Lead

Apr 2019 - Oct 2020Remote

  • Served as the direct manager for Mizuni's 7-person engineering team for six months following its acquisition by Hoonuit, sustaining delivery continuity through integration while retaining every engineer.
  • Led technical execution for complex district and state implementations supporting multi-million-dollar ARR customer relationships.
  • Architected, implemented, and rolled out database-migration automation that standardized schema deployments and enabled the company's first continuous delivery pipeline; secured C-suite and VP support across Product and Engineering and drove organization-wide adoption.
  • Architected a cloud ETL and integration platform that reduced ingestion timelines by 10x and cut delivery time for new source systems roughly in half while improving maintainability for customer-specific work.

Technologies: Java, SQL Server, Python, JavaScript, Azure, Docker

Mizuni (acquired by Hoonuit)

Director of Product Innovation

Mar 2004 - Mar 2019Dallas, TX

Joined the founding team as a data analyst and advanced through engineering and product leadership roles to Director of Product Innovation, ultimately owning product direction and a three-engineer development team.

  • Led the full-stack re-architecture of the customer-facing analytics platform across UX, frontend, APIs, and the data layer, moving the product from on-premises deployments to fully cloud-hosted SaaS serving 1M+ students and teachers.
  • Built a program management module that generated $300K+ in standalone ARR.
  • Built and led a three-engineer team, owning hiring and technical delivery while remaining hands-on in product development, customer demos, and implementations.
  • Partnered with executive leadership on product strategy, technical sales, and acquisition planning through the company's successful multimillion-dollar acquisition by Hoonuit.

Technologies: C#, .NET, SQL Server, JavaScript, Vue.js, AWS

Skills

Leadership
Engineering management · Hiring and team growth · Coaching and career development · Performance management · Organizational design · Globally distributed teams
AI Product
AI document intelligence · LLM integrations · Multimodal extraction · OCR · Prompt engineering · OpenAI · Gemini
AI SDLC
Agentic software development · Claude Code · Codex · AI-assisted planning · implementation · testing · and code review
Architecture
Full-stack architecture · Cloud and serverless systems · Event-driven architecture · Platform engineering · API design · ETL and integrations
Technology
C#/.NET · TypeScript · React · Node.js · Python · PHP · Java · PostgreSQL · SQL Server · MySQL · AWS · Azure · Kubernetes (K8s) · Datadog · Sentry

Education

Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
B.S. Electrical Engineering