Marco Lee
Applied AI Engineer
12+ years taking software to production. Now I help teams ship AI features and automations, and I'm open to senior Applied AI roles and contracts.
Guatemala (UTC-6) · English C1 · Remote
I led engineering for Guatemala.com's media network (5M+ monthly users) until March 2026, built native mobile apps and my own web products, and build AI features and agents in my own products. Since 2026 I work independently, remote and on US hours.
Experience
12+ years of shipping, leading, and owning production systems.
- Scaled multi-brand content platforms to 5M+ monthly users on auto-scaling AWS.
- Drove the backend migration from monolithic WordPress to headless WordPress + NestJS APIs.
- Owned ad systems, performance, and backend architecture across the network — work tied directly to ad revenue.
- Led adoption of AI-assisted development workflows across the remote engineering team: rollout, mentoring, and day-to-day change management.
AWSHeadless WordPressNestJSNode.jsTeam Leadership- Built Laravel REST APIs and data models for multi-brand media properties, with React/JavaScript frontends on top.
- Shipped web + hybrid mobile products on high-traffic LAMP/WordPress systems at scale.
- Delivered continuously at media scale for five years.
LaravelREST APIsMySQLHybrid Mobile- 2018 — Present
Founder & Product Engineer
Independent Products
- Design, build, and operate independent products end to end, owning their P&L: revenue (AdSense, Lemon Squeezy payments), hosting and AI costs, and growth metrics in GA4 and Search Console.
- Published Ring Light Mirror on the App Store (iPhone, iPad, Mac, SwiftUI), with an Android version in Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, using an AI-assisted engineering workflow.
- Shipped GamingLab in 6 languages and agente-ia.dev, a paid course platform about AI agents.
- Launched Códice, a Guatemalan law reader with 9,000+ articles, and built a personal iOS mail client with AI triage and phishing detection.
Next.jsSwiftUIKotlinApplied AI - Jan 2014 — Sep 2015
Web Developer
XYZ Network Inc
- High-traffic LAMP/WordPress delivery for brands including Star Media.
- Frontend and backend feature work under production load.
LAMPWordPressHigh Traffic
Case Study
Architecture, delivery, and team leadership at scale.
Scaling Guatemala.com's platform to 5M+ monthly users (2020–2026)
The challenge
A multi-brand media network running on legacy monolithic WordPress, under heavy and spiky Latin American traffic — with ad revenue directly tied to speed and uptime.
What I did
Led the backend re-architecture to headless WordPress + NestJS APIs on auto-scaling AWS, with Next.js frontends consuming them. Owned ad systems and performance, planned the migration path, and mentored the team while introducing AI-assisted engineering workflows.
The outcome
A modern platform serving 5M+ monthly users, faster pages that protect ad revenue, and a stack a fully remote team ships on with confidence.
Featured Projects
Products I design, build, ship, and operate end to end.
Bright Smile Dental
Example · AI assistant · online
Appointment confirmed
Dental cleaning · Tomorrow, 3:30 pm
Ana López · reminder 2 h before
Added to the clinic's Google Calendar
WhatsApp AI AssistantInteractive
Interactive demo of the WhatsApp assistant I build for small businesses: it offers open slots, collects the customer's name, confirms the appointment, and adds it to the business's Google Calendar with a reminder. Shown with a fictional dental clinic.
Interactive demo: watch it book an appointment end to end.
codicegt.com
Guatemala's main laws as clean, structured text instead of PDFs: browse by book, title, and chapter, search by article number or by situation, bookmark and cite. A static Astro site with one page per law and article, fed by a Python pipeline from official sources.
43 laws and 9,109 articles, in Spanish and English.
Mail for iOS
Native iOS email client I built for my own Gmail accounts. A serverless backend on Vercel listens to Gmail push events, classifies importance with rules plus an AI model, flags phishing, sends push notifications, schedules snooze and send-later, and summarizes threads with an LLM.
AI triage and phishing detection, in daily use on my own inboxes.
Ring Light Mirror
Native lighted-mirror app, live on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac (SwiftUI). The Android version (Kotlin + Jetpack Compose) is in Google Play testing. 9 languages, no accounts, nothing recorded or uploaded.
Published native app, built with AI-assisted engineering.
agente-ia.dev
AI agents course platform. Built with Next.js, Turso DB, and Lemon Squeezy for payments.
0→1 paid course platform, built and operated solo.
calcufast.com
Suite of fast, SEO-optimized online calculators. Built with Next.js for performance and organic search growth.
SEO-first finance tools for Guatemala & Central America.
gaminglab.dev
Browser games portal with 6-language internationalization. Monetized with AdSense and validated for ads.
80+ games in 6 languages, AdSense-approved.
singlesbar.net
Website for Single's Bar, Puerto Barrios. Built with Astro and Tailwind CSS for maximum speed.
Real client work — WhatsApp bookings for a live venue.
Skills & Tools
AI-assisted workflows, backed by hands-on product engineering.
Applied AI
Frontend
Mobile
Backend & APIs
Cloud, CMS & Tooling
Education
B.S. in Industrial Engineering
Galileo University, Guatemala
2013 — 2017
Postgraduate in Quality Standards
Galileo University, Guatemala
2017 — 2018
Languages
Spanish: native
English: C1, professional
GitHub Contributions
Consistency compounds — a snapshot of my open activity.
AI in daily practice
I've used AI tools since 2023. These are the tokens processed this year by the coding agents and AI tools I work with every day, measured from my own local logs.
46.6B
tokens processed
Includes cached context; 2.5B new input and output tokens.
230
active days
Days with logged AI usage since January 2026; using AI tools since 2023.
9
AI tools in the logs
Hermes · Pi agent · Codex · Claude Code · OpenCode · Kimi Code · OpenClaw · Grok CLI · Gemini CLI
- Hermes
- Pi agent
- Codex
- Claude Code
- Other
| Month | Hermes | Pi agent | Codex | Claude Code | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 2026 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2.9B | 116M |
| February 2026 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1B | 54M |
| March 2026 | 0 | 0 | 281M | 308M | 24M |
| April 2026 | 84M | 4M | 84M | 24M | 54M |
| May 2026 | 1.9B | <1M | 2.6B | 0 | 167M |
| June 2026 | 851M | <1M | 4.4B | 0 | 44M |
| July 2026 | 987M | 1M | 1.2B | 0 | 304M |
| August 2026 | 2.4B | 2.5B | 141M | 0 | 325M |
| September 2026 | 10.5B | 8.9B | 363M | 3.9B | 146M |
Source: local usage logs from my Mac and my Linux workstation (Hermes, Pi, Codex via CodexBar, Claude Code, OpenCode, Kimi Code, OpenClaw, Grok CLI and Gemini CLI), aggregated by a script in this site's repo. Early-2026 Claude Code usage survives only in summary caches, so its cached-context share is estimated. Updated Oct 1, 2026.
What you get when you hire me
Beyond the stack — how I actually add value.
- Architecture ownership
- From the first product decision to architecture, implementation, and operations: I own the work beyond the prototype.
- Team leadership
- Experience leading remote engineering teams serving millions of users, with mentoring and clear communication in English (C1) or Spanish.
- AI-assisted delivery
- I use coding agents in real product work, including Ring Light Mirror, and have introduced AI-assisted workflows within an engineering team.
Hiring for Applied AI or product engineering?
I'm open to senior roles and contracts, remote and on US hours. Tell me about the team and the problem, in English or Spanish.
I reply within 24 hours.
Based in Guatemala (UTC-6) — full overlap with US time zones.