Practice Pitches

Hi, I'm Gerardo — a senior mobile engineer with more than ten years in JavaScript and the last six focused on React Native. I've shipped eight-plus apps to the App Store and Google Play.

Most recently I led the mobile work on Valt Connect, a private-markets app, where I owned real-time chat, biometric auth, performance, and the store releases — in TypeScript, with Expo, React Query, and Zustand.

I'm drawn to this role because it's senior, fully remote, and React Native at its core.

Sure. I'm Gerardo Cordero, a senior mobile engineer working fully remote from Latin America. I have over ten years of full-stack JavaScript, and since 2019 I've specialized in cross-platform mobile with React Native.

In that time I've shipped more than eight apps across about ten companies and five industries — private markets, financial education, telecom, home services, and consumer apps.

For the last two years I was the lead engineer on a two-person mobile team building Valt Connect, a private-markets app for investors. I built real-time chat with Twilio Conversations, biometric login with FaceID and TouchID, and Salesforce-based authentication — and I owned our production releases and App Store review responses. A big part of that work was performance: I removed re-render flickering and frozen screens, and added optimistic updates across the app.

My daily stack is React Native, Expo, TypeScript, React Query, and Zustand, and I'm comfortable in large, evolving codebases and monorepos. I'm looking for a senior, remote React Native role where I can go deep on a mature product — which is exactly what this is.

I'll give you the short arc. I started as a full-stack JavaScript developer about ten years ago — Meteor, Angular, then React — working remotely for startups and agencies. I learned to own things end to end early: frontend, backend, deployments, even Linux servers.

Around 2019 I found my focus: mobile. I moved into React Native and never looked back. At Novacomp I shipped five apps to the stores for US clients — discovery apps like SplashSpot and Hotspotters — and at the same time I learned AWS Amplify on the job: Cognito, AppSync GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB. That period taught me how to ramp fast on an unfamiliar stack and still deliver.

The last three years were my deepest chapter. Through TrueNorth and then directly at Valt Network, I was the lead mobile engineer on Valt Connect, a private-markets app. I architected a schema-driven form builder reused across a Turborepo monorepo, integrated Twilio real-time chat and PSPDFKit for native PDF rendering, and migrated us to native deep linking. As the senior voice on a two-person team, I owned releases, code reviews, and performance.

What ties it all together is range — I've been the backend person, the PM, the interviewer, and the performance specialist — but mobile is the craft I love most. That's why a senior, React-Native-first role on a mature, experiment-driven product is exactly the next step I want.

I came to React Native from full-stack JavaScript, so at first it was just practical — one language, two platforms. But what made me stay is that mobile is where engineering constraints are real. You're designing for the worst phone, the worst network, and a battery the user actually watches.

React Native sits in a sweet spot for that: I get the velocity of JavaScript and a shared codebase, but I can still drop into Swift or Kotlin and write a native module when I need to — like I did patching PSPDFKit and building custom camera-permission hooks.

And the platform has genuinely matured. The New Architecture — Fabric, TurboModules, JSI — is the default now, Hermes ships by default, and the old bridge bottleneck is gone. So the old “React Native is slow” argument really doesn't hold anymore if you know how to profile and optimize, which is exactly the part I enjoy.

Reusable structure — fill the [brackets] for each company before you record.

Three things pull me to [company]. First, the product and its values — [the mission or value that genuinely resonates with you]. Building software where [the impact it has on users] is the kind of work I want to put my name on.

Second, the engineering reality fits me exactly. You're a mature React Native product with a sophisticated codebase, and I do my best work in large, evolving systems — I've spent the last three years deep in one. Joining the [team you'd join] is almost on the nose: [the surface — e.g. search, filtering, discovery] is precisely what I built on Valt Connect and on my consumer discovery apps.

Third, the way you work — [experiment-driven / craft-focused / whatever they emphasize]. I like building where data tells us if we were right, not opinions. So it's the right product, the right codebase, and the right way of working, all at once.

The project I'm proudest of is Valt Connect — a private-markets mobile app for investors and deal teams. I joined for the first cross-platform release and stayed as the lead engineer on a two-person mobile team for about three years.

On the architecture side, the most reusable thing I built was a schema-driven form builder — a package that renders forms, validation, and error handling from a schema, shared across apps in a Turborepo monorepo. That turned weeks of form work into hours.

For real-time, I integrated Twilio Conversations as a singleton provider — chat rooms, unread tracking, private flows, and push notifications. For trust and security I built Google Sign-In, biometric auth with FaceID and TouchID, an App-Store-compliant account deletion flow, and Salesforce auth through External Connected Apps for secure token management.

I also integrated PSPDFKit for native PDF rendering of investor statements, with a custom toolbar and a couple of native module patches, and I moved us from Firebase deep links to native universal links on both platforms.

The part I care about most is performance and ownership: I tracked down re-render flickering and frozen screens, added optimistic updates across profiles and bookmarks, and I owned the production releases and the App Store review responses end to end.

Situation. On Valt Connect, users were hitting flickering lists and screens that froze for a second or two when navigating between profiles and feeds. On a premium app for investors, that felt cheap, and it was hurting trust.

Task. As the senior mobile engineer, I owned getting us back to smooth, 60-FPS interactions without a big rewrite.

Action. I profiled instead of guessing. I measured re-renders and found components re-rendering on every state change because of unstable props and context values. I memoized the expensive components, stabilized callbacks and selectors, and moved frequently-changing state out of broad contexts into Zustand so only the components that actually used a slice re-rendered. For the frozen screens, I moved heavy work off the critical render path and added optimistic updates so actions like bookmarking felt instant instead of waiting on the network.

Result. The flickering was gone, navigation felt immediate, and the bookmark and profile flows updated instantly. Just as important, I turned it into a habit on the team — profile first, then fix the specific re-render, rather than sprinkling memo everywhere and hoping.

Situation. At Valt we were a two-person mobile team owning a growing app, with product, design, and backend all moving fast around us. There was no one above me on mobile to defer to.

Task. I had to be the person who set the bar — technically and operationally — while still shipping features every sprint.

Action. I took ownership of the things that are easy to neglect on a small team. I built the shared form-builder package so we'd stop rewriting forms. I set up our release process and owned App Store submissions and review responses, including a compliant account-deletion flow. I did the code reviews, kept the codebase testable, and added version-based cache invalidation so we could push fixes without breaking older clients. When something was ambiguous, I asked product the clarifying questions early instead of guessing.

Result. We shipped consistently and cleanly for years with a tiny team, and the form builder and release process outlived any single feature. Earlier in my career I'd also run recruiting interviews and mentored a junior developer, so stepping into that senior, set-the-standard role felt natural.

Situation. At Novacomp I was hired as a frontend mobile developer, but the client work needed full backends on AWS — and I'd never touched Amplify or AppSync.

Task. I had to deliver production backends for our React Native apps without slowing the team down, while priorities shifted between several client apps.

Action. I treated it like any unfamiliar codebase: learn the smallest piece that unblocks the next feature, ship it, repeat. I picked up Cognito and OAuth, AppSync GraphQL, Lambda, DynamoDB, and OpenSearch on the job, leaning on docs and small spikes. In parallel I kept shipping the mobile side and even took on some PM coordination with the clients. I'd done this before — at Bits Kingdom I drove the team through React Native 0.59 to 0.62 upgrades and the Hermes rollout — so I trusted the process of ramping fast under pressure.

Result. We shipped five apps to the stores in that period, with me owning both the frontend and the backend I'd just learned. That experience is exactly why a fast, experiment-driven environment appeals to me — shifting priorities and new tools are where I'm comfortable.

If you're asking why me — it's fit on three levels. The role is senior React Native on a mature, experiment-driven product, and that's the exact environment where I've spent the last three years and done my best work. The team's surfaces — [search, filtering, the area you'd own] — are things I've shipped before. And I bring the senior habits you actually need day to day: I profile before I optimize, I write tested and reusable code, and I own work through QA and store release, not just to “done on my machine.”

On logistics, I'm fully set up for remote, I can commit to the time-zone overlap you need, and I'm comfortable being the kind of engineer who asks the clarifying question early and communicates clearly with non-technical teammates.

And a couple of questions I'd love to ask you: What does the team's experimentation loop look like today — how quickly can an engineer get an A/B test in front of users? And where is the codebase on the New Architecture migration — fully on Fabric, or still in progress?