About Esteban Lalinde
👋 Hey! I’m Esteban Lalinde, a Solutions Architect and VP of Product Development at Mill5, where I lead engineering for Olympus’s nCare 4K platform—a next-generation intraoperative media recording system used in operating rooms worldwide.
I’ve spent 21 years building enterprise cloud systems, with the last several years focused entirely on Microsoft Azure. I’m AZ-305, AZ-400, and AZ-204 certified. Today, I split my time between leading two squads building different hardware variants of the same platform and creating AI-native engineering workflows.
One of those workflows takes a Product Backlog Item, drafts an implementation plan, writes production-ready code, and opens the pull request. It isn’t a demo: it ships into a regulated, operating-room-grade medical platform. That makes getting the guardrails right just as interesting as the automation itself.
Before Mill5, I was a Technical Lead at Globant, where I led a 12-engineer team deploying a COVID-19 stimulus platform across three Azure regions: high-stakes, high-visibility, and unforgiving on uptime. I also designed a configuration-driven ETL orchestration service whose compute spins up and tears down with each run, so you pay only for the seconds you use. Earlier, I built a real-time US and European stock market bot for Microsoft Teams, running entirely on Azure Functions, Kubernetes, and Bot Services.
What interests me most right now is the gap between using AI to write code and using it as a genuine engineering collaborator with judgment: plan generation, code-review loops, test generation, and the moments when a human architect still needs to hold the line. I write here about agentic development workflows, Azure architecture decisions, and what it actually takes to lead engineering teams through this shift—not merely theorize about it.
Outside work, I contribute to a project that supports Neocatechumenal community organization in Colombia: small scale, but with real users and real constraints.
I’m based in MedellÃn, Colombia, and work with teams across the US and Europe. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn or check out my CV. I’m always happy to talk architecture, AI-assisted engineering, or building teams that ship. Talk soon!