Profile

About

Carlos Ulloque is a Mission Critical Engineer based in Panama, focused on reliability across infrastructure, networks, software architecture, and security — systems built to keep running when something fails.

The work is end to end: infrastructure and networking, data platforms, and the software that runs on top. The systems are in production, where availability and recovery time are requirements rather than goals — Oracle platforms (Exadata, RAC, Data Guard, ZDLRA), Linux, and containers with Docker and Kubernetes.

Beyond operating systems, I design and build them, and I work close to the product decisions that shape them — defining scope and priorities with the same discipline used to keep a system running under pressure. Services and microservices where the domain calls for them; monoliths where they are the simpler thing to operate and reason about. Architecture is a tradeoff to be argued, not a trend to follow.

The thread through all of it is resilience: think about failure modes first, design for controlled degradation, and have the recovery path defined before the incident rather than during it. On security the stance is deliberately distrustful — explicit trust boundaries, minimal surface, secure defaults, and systems built assuming compromise instead of bolting on controls afterward.