About Me
I’m Jose Villalta, an infrastructure engineer at Amazon Web Services building the systems that power millions of containerized workloads. I maintain the Fargate agent - the data plane that creates and manages serverless containers at AWS scale.
My Path to Infrastructure
My career has been about building systems that work when it matters most. I spent seven years at Motorola writing embedded software for P25 radios - the devices that first responders depend on when lives are on the line. Police and firefighters still use radios running code I helped build.
At Impinj, I made the jump from embedded systems to distributed infrastructure. I built factory test software for RFID chips and led the transformation from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to Docker-based microservices. This is where I fell in love with containers and the problems they solve at scale.
Before that, I interned at IBM on ASIC design teams, writing Perl scripts that generated test cases from chip specifications. I learned the Linux command line there, and I’m still learning.
My technical foundation: Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University (2006), Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Florida (2011), both earned while working full time. I’ve never stopped learning since.
Before Software
Before I became an engineer, I was a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps Infantry, stationed at Camp Lejeune and deployed around the world. After the Marines, I joined the Florida Army National Guard as a reservist while working full time as a bank teller and going to college at night. I was deployed to Iraq in 2003-2004 with the 124th Infantry (Florida National Guard).
I am American by choice - born in Venezuela, moved to Florida at 13, joined the Marines right after high school in 1998. I got married in 2002 to an amazing woman. My daughters were born in 2005 and 2007, and they transformed my life. I moved to Seattle in 2014. I have two bulldogs, Chicha and Petunia, who rule the house.
What Drives Me
I build reliable infrastructure because I learned what “mission-critical” means in the Marines - when systems fail, people get hurt. I think about who technology serves because I’ve navigated systems not built for people like me. I care about sustainability because technical decisions at AWS scale have planetary impact.
I believe in democracy, liberty, and justice for all. I prefer hard truths over comfortable lies. Black Lives Matter.
Outside of Work
I love to read - philosophy, science, math, history, and anything about software and systems. I ski with my youngest daughter as often as I can. I love a good baseball game. I cry at the end of good movies. I’m interested in how things work and why they matter - whether that’s container orchestration, democratic institutions, or the universe itself.