Nicolas Garcia Belmonte

Nicolas Belmonte is Senior Engineering Manager for the XR Maps group at Facebook Reality Labs.

Prior to Mapbox and Facebook, Nicolas was Director of Engineering and Head of Visualization at Uber. Nicolas' group built advanced products to explore self-driving car, geospatial and business data in the context of urban mobility. Prior to Uber Nicolas was Staff Engineer at Twitter, developing public-facing visualizations published at the NYTimes, Cannes Lions and during Twitter IPO.

Specializations: Leadership, Technical and Product Vision, Team Teaching and Building, Data Visualization Research and Development, Open Source Software, Computer Graphics.

11/19-now

Senior Engineering Manager - Facebook Reality Labs

Leading a 80ppl engineering organization focused on mapping data and services.
Our group develops Map Data and Services leveraged in 100s of surfaces in Facebook's family of apps.
I work on setting direction, product and technical vision for the teams. I support people (eng + mgrs) growth and development.
I align cross-team with various other FRL groups to support our mission to build tools that help people feel connected, anytime, anywhere.

03/19-11/19

VP, Maps - Mapbox

Responsible for a 60ppl product, engineering and design org focused on building Maps.
The Maps group consists of 5 teams across SDKs for Mobile, Web, Embedded, Maps APIs, and Design.
Delivered vision and operational planning for the next 18 months for Maps.
Hired and coached team members, notably improving team health and output.
Had to part ways with Mapbox to move from San Francisco to New York.

03/15-03/19

Director of Engineering - Uber Technologies

Started as Staff Engineer → Engineering Manager → Senior EM → Director of Engineering.
Started with 1 engineer, built a 50+ people organization
Set product vision around data visualization for mobility which influenced multiple organizations at Uber.
Shaped Uber's culture with a vision around Open Source and Computer Graphics.
Promoted dozens of engineers and managers, to senior and staff level, advocating for and championing their work
Team sustained 0 attrition during toughest times at Uber
Team delivered industry-level software for visualization of geospatial, self-driving and business data generating partnerships with multiple teams and external organizations

04/12-03/15

Staff Engineer - Twitter

Started as Senior Software Engineer → Staff Software Engineer
Owned and developed internal frameworks for visualization of business and geospatial data
Was technical lead for external data visualization work, owning the delivery platform and release process, partnering with the senior data editor
Mentored multiple other engineers, taking the lead in the adoption of Scala-based tooling
Leveraged computer graphics (WebGL) to deliver compelling visualizations of massive datasets
Gave dozens of internal and external talks in english, french, spanish
Published visualization papers accepted at IEEEVis
Developed impactful open source software

10/10-03/12

Graphics Team Lead - Sencha Inc.

Lead Architect for the Graphics team at Sencha. My team built the graphics framework shipped with ExtJS and Sencha Touch products.
My team produced graphics and visualization frameworks like PhiloGL for advanced WebGL-based data visualization and JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, that were used by organizations like Google, Mozilla and The White House.
I joined Sencha after they acquired my data visualization framework, JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit.

02/08-09/10

R & D Software Engineer - Exalead

Created advanced interactive data visualizations of data indexed by Exalead Search Engine products.

2006-2007

Software Engineering Intern - Netlabs

Developed web applications mainly programmed in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript (AJAX), XML, XSL, PHP 4.0/5.0 and Oracle and MySQL databases.

Lecturer for a 45ppl cohort at UC Davis MSBA program on Visualization
Speaker at multiple technology conferences.
Author of multiple open source software.
Author of visualization papers accepted at IEEEVis.

Spending time with family, programming MathArt and digital fabrication, playing classical guitar, reading french books, play tennis.