Carmen Huidobro

(she/her) | CTO building human, trustworthy products

Hello!

Profile photo of Carmen Huidobro

I'm a Chief Technology Officer who builds products and spends a lot of time thinking about how developers actually use them.
A big part of my work is helping teams decide what should be automated and what should stay in users' hands. Those questions sound trivial until you're shipping them for real.
I care a lot about efficacy, trust and technology that feels human. Before this chapter, I spent years in developer education and community building through conferences, workshops and projects like badwebsite.club, helping people get unstuck and grow.
I'm located in Vienna, Austria. If you're building developer-facing products or trying to make complex systems more understandable, I'd be delighted to chat.

  • 🇨🇦English spoken
  • 🇨🇱Se habla Español
  • 🇦🇹Deutschsprachig
  • 🇫🇷Eh... bof

Kudos

I would put 5 stars for JS 😛

— Antonija Šimić, Frontend Developer

Carmen is a great engineer, very resourceful when it comes to dealing with new technologies (software & hardware) and an all around wonderful person to hang out with!

— Dražen Lučanin, developer, data analyst and the founder of Punk Rock Dev

If you’re hosting an event, looking to educate folks on a particular skill set, or seeking to build empathetic, inclusive, and engaged spaces — look no further than Carmen!

— Erin Mikail Staples, Developer Advocate

Interesting and strange.

— Rinat Latyfullin aka Erika aka paleodev aka Rick technolithic

Engineering and Product Experience

Chief Technology Officer

Incredible Holding GmbH

September 2025 - Present

https://incrediblebee.com
  • Outcome: Increased delivery predictability across product lines
  • Scope: Engineering operating model and portfolio execution governance
  • Tech: Systems architecture, engineering operations, and product governance.
  • Set technical strategy, platform architecture direction, and portfolio-level delivery sequencing across teams.
  • Lead senior hiring, capability development, and engineering performance calibration for technical leadership roles.
  • Govern AI capability adoption through staged rollout frameworks balancing trust, compliance, feasibility, and maintainability.

Developer Educator

Directus

September 2024 - September 2025

https://directus.io
  • Outcome: Accelerated enterprise platform adoption and integration success
  • Scope: Implementation-first architecture guidance and onboarding playbooks
  • Tech: APIs, schema-driven systems, and developer enablement pipelines.
  • Engineer production-oriented reference implementations mapping platform primitives to real deployment patterns.
  • Translate roadmap capabilities into executable integration guidance with product and engineering stakeholders.
  • Maintain high-fidelity documentation systems that reduce time-to-value across release cycles.

Chief Software Officer

Incredible Bee

September 2009 - September 2025

https://incrediblebee.com
  • Outcome: Sustained long-term macOS product reliability across release cycles
  • Scope: End-to-end product engineering and release operations leadership
  • Tech: Objective-C, RubyMotion, App Store delivery, and build-signing automation.
  • Lead end-to-end macOS feature engineering from architecture through validated release.
  • Own signing, packaging, notarization, and App Store submission pipelines.
  • Coordinate lifecycle maintenance, defect triage, and roadmap execution for long-lived products.
  • Evaluate, sequence, and govern AI capability adoption with a risk-aware product framework balancing trust, feasibility, and maintainability.

Head of Developer Education

DevCraft Academy

July 2023 - August 2024

https://devcraft.academy/
  • Outcome: Elevated engineering throughput and software quality outcomes
  • Scope: Product-delivery curriculum design and execution strategy
  • Tech: TypeScript ecosystems, testing strategy, and release engineering workflows.
  • Design advanced engineering programs emphasizing architecture decisions, verification strategy, and release discipline.
  • Lead project-based instruction centered on shipping production-caliber product capabilities.
  • Continuously optimize curriculum using delivery telemetry, learner outcomes, and industry constraints.

Senior Developer Advocate

Suborbital Software Systems

February 2022 - June 2023

https://suborbital.dev
  • Outcome: Improved onboarding efficiency and roadmap signal quality
  • Scope: Cross-functional product feedback and developer enablement loops
  • Tech: DX instrumentation, technical documentation architecture, and product communication systems.
  • Operate cross-functional signal loops connecting developers, engineering teams, and product leadership.
  • Produce technical enablement assets that materially reduce time-to-first-success for adopters.
  • Convert developer friction data into prioritized product and architecture improvements.

Head of Open Source

CodeSee

January 2021 - January 2022

https://codesee.io/
  • Outcome: Expanded engineering adoption through open-source programs
  • Scope: OSS strategy, contributor operations, and product-facing technical enablement
  • Tech: OSS governance, contributor systems, and codebase intelligence tooling.
  • Lead OSS initiatives aligned with product-market adoption and long-horizon engineering leverage.
  • Design contributor operating models that increase collaboration quality and ecosystem sustainability.
  • Publish technical narratives and executable demos connecting product capabilities to production workflows.

Mobile Software Engineer

Primed Mind

November 2020 - June 2021

https://primedmind.com/
  • Outcome: Delivered stable cross-platform mobile capabilities in production
  • Scope: Consumer wellness product feature delivery and maintenance
  • Tech: React Native, iOS, Android, and mobile release operations.
  • Implement user-facing product capabilities spanning guided sessions, playback flows, and session continuity.
  • Maintain shared cross-platform architecture while preserving native-quality behavior across iOS and Android.
  • Improve runtime stability and performance through systematic profiling and iterative hardening.

Mobile Software Engineer

drd

April 2020 - October 2020

https://drd.at/
  • Outcome: Shipped resilient telemedicine workflows for mobile care delivery
  • Scope: Patient and clinician cross-platform communication experiences
  • Tech: React Native, iOS, Android, and real-time communication workflows.
  • Engineer patient and clinician workflows for mobile-first remote care experiences.
  • Build and maintain resilient cross-platform video consultation functionality.
  • Stabilize critical communication paths through release hardening and rapid issue remediation.

iOS Software Engineer

Bloom Diagnostics

October 2019 - March 2020

http://bloomdiagnostics.com
  • Outcome: Improved reliability of Bluetooth-enabled diagnostics experiences
  • Scope: iOS measurement workflows and device integration quality
  • Tech: Swift, iOS, BLE, and protocol reliability engineering.
  • Build iOS measurement experiences for Bluetooth-connected diagnostics hardware.
  • Improve protocol reliability and edge-case handling across device communication layers.
  • Partner with product stakeholders to raise usability fidelity and release quality thresholds.

Mobile Software Engineer

Craftstrom

March 2019 - September 2019

https://www.craftstrom.com
  • Outcome: Delivered field-ready mobile tooling for commercial solar operations
  • Scope: Cross-platform feature delivery and release stability
  • Tech: React Native, mobile CI pipelines, and dependency lifecycle management.
  • Implement cross-platform feature sets supporting on-site commercial solar workflows.
  • Maintain release-channel stability across iOS and Android deployment tracks.
  • Execute dependency modernization to improve security posture and long-term maintainability.

Education

Formal Education

B.Sc. Software Engineering

Vienna University of Technology

October 2007 - Present

Introduction to Machine Learning

Stanford University

January 2018

Lemmings Summer and Winter Batch

Lemmings.io

Summer 2016, Early 2018

  • Modules included - Software engineering and project management, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, information security.
  • Seminar paper - The evolution of mapping tools and their implementations.
  • Bachelor thesis - Teaching kids to code - Bridging the gap between scientific research and practical experience.
  • Building Facebook Messenger Bots.
  • Product Design.

Self Study

  • Fundamentals - Refactoring (Beck, Fowler, 1999), UNIX in a nutshell (Robbins, 2005), Extreme Programming Explained (Beck, 1999), Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Feathers, 2004), Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (Metz, 2007).
  • Object Oriented Programming - Design Patterns (Gang of four, 1994).
  • Programming Languages - Programming Phoenix (Tate, McCord, Valim, 2016), Programming Elixir (Thomas, 2014), The Rust Programming Language (Nichols, Klabnik, 2018), Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! A Beginner's Guide (Lipovaca, 2011).

Community Work