Gustavo Medina

Engineering Director

Condé Nast  |  New York, NY

Lead the digital content platform org (6 engineering teams, managing through 2 EMs and a staff engineer), owning content management (Copilot CMS), cross-brand syndication, editorial planning, rights management, platform APIs, digital asset management, experimentation, and a newsletter platform. The platform serves 100M+ daily requests behind 71 brand sites including Vogue, GQ, Wired, and The New Yorker.

• Drove the platform toward a "Create / Consume" north-star architecture, migrating to CQRS to separate write-path (existing APIs) from read-path concerns; cut P95 latency on uncached requests from ~300ms to under ~120ms on migrated sites, rolling out brand-by-brand.
• Secured executive buy-in for a dedicated team behind the Consume layer and a live GraphQL Federation supergraph (Apollo), now serving multiple subgraphs and consumed by three native apps and web, with adoption expanding across product teams inside and outside the CMS.
• Leading a CTO-sponsored initiative to reshape how my teams build: driving agentic coding adoption over the past year, deploying an AI code reviewer to keep pace with rising PR volume, and making proprietary APIs agent-accessible via MCP and custom tooling.
• Partnered with product, editorial, and SEO teams to embed AI into core editorial workflows, including cross-brand syndication translation (e.g. Vogue US → Vogue Japan), automated content tagging, image alt-title generation, and a pre-publish SEO recommendation tool, reducing manual editorial effort across the publishing lifecycle.
• Partner closely with executive Product leadership to align platform roadmaps with business goals, embedding engineering in product planning rather than taking requirements downstream.
• Migrated orphaned in-house systems, left unmaintained after organizational changes, onto supported enterprise platforms (Snowplow for data capture, Iterable for email, GrowthBook for experimentation), removing operational risk and single points of failure.
• Drove observability across my teams' services, championing OpenTelemetry adoption to cut error rates ~65% and reduce MTTR ~30%, hardening reliability for multi-million-dollar tentpole events like the Met Gala.

Senior Engineering Manager

Condé Nast  |  New York, NY

• Led 3 cross-functional squads (3 EMs and 15 engineers total) across the US and India, on the Copilot CMS and Encore syndication platforms.
• Scaled headcount 150% in one year, standing up Condé Nast's first two platform engineering teams in India.
• Localized the CMS for 10+ languages and deployed platform APIs across regions, onboarding international editorial teams (migrating brands like GQ UK off their legacy CMS) and growing the platform to 32 brand sites.
• Migrated the Copilot CMS frontend from EmberJS to React, the company-wide standard, lowering the barrier for engineers across Condé Nast to build in the CMS.
• Streamlined editorial authoring in the CMS (auto-complete fields, suggested publish URLs, an improved asset picker, batch operations across gallery items, and formatting-preserving paste from Google Docs), cutting article creation from ~15 to ~8 minutes and galleries from ~20 to ~11.

Engineering Manager

Condé Nast  |  New York, NY

• Created Encore, a syndication service that grew into a standalone app for cross-brand publishing, now producing roughly 1 in 4 articles published across Condé Nast.
• Led architecture and implementation of the home and channel page curation tools inside the CMS, giving editorial teams fine-grained control over their landing pages.
• Built a custom schema, validation, and form framework exposing a DSL for building CMS forms without hand-writing EmberJS or markup, later reused in the React-based CMS.

Sr. Software Engineer

Condé Nast  |  New York, NY

• Joined Copilot in its first year and helped shape its early architecture, re-modeling the image and clip schemas and building an image-cropping tool still used by editorial staff today.
• Built configuration and infrastructure tooling to onboard new brand sites onto the platform, used to launch 9 over two years.

Sr. Software Engineer

Maker Studios (blip.tv)  |  New York, NY

• Engineered high-scale video APIs, transcoding pipelines, and media-streaming services supporting 50M+ monthly unique views.
• Built a next-generation web video player from scratch, improving performance ~35% across devices.

Software Engineer

GroupCommerce  |  New York, NY

• Built white-label e-commerce and merchant platforms with a focus on cross-platform mobile.

Sr. Software Engineer

TheLadders  |  New York, NY

• Owned engineering for the job-seeker side of a two-sided (job seekers and recruiters), high-traffic job-search marketplace.