Sergio de la Garza
About
A senior engineer's personal practice, 20 years in the making.
Who I am
I'm Sergio de la Garza, a senior full-stack & AI engineer with 20 years in production — building on WordPress since version 1.5, and shipping client work for US companies since 2005. This is an independent practice: the same engineer scopes, builds, and supports every project, end to end.
I spent 13 years as the sole in-house engineer at a US digital marketing agency: 200+ client websites designed, built, rescued, and operated — including the agency's own revenue-facing site, its internal fulfillment platform, and its data tooling. Those 13 years became the process I run today: scoped in writing, built upgrade-safe, measured in numbers, documented at handoff.
I'm deliberately independent. Your project is scoped, built, and shipped by the engineer you talked to — no account-manager telephone game, no handoffs to juniors. When a project needs more hands, I extend with vetted specialists under the same standards.
20 years, four eras
2005 – 2008
Independent practice
The origin: a solo practice delivering PHP/MySQL and WordPress sites for small businesses — scoping, building, and supporting each one end to end.
2008 – 2012
Founding developer, ISLA
Front-end and WordPress engineering for an international nonprofit — its public site, a WooCommerce store within months of WooCommerce's 2011 release, and a field-report application for drowning-incident tracking.
2012 – 2025
Agency anchor, US digital-marketing agency
13 years as a US agency's only engineer: 200+ client sites, the agency's own platform, internal tooling, 6 white-label theme systems — and a custom theme that ran 10+ years without a rebuild.
2025 – 2026
Platforms & AI, Calibrate Network / OnRamp
BI platforms and B2B integration systems: a 2.26M-transaction dashboard at sub-200ms, a 9-microservice backend with 6 AI agents, and 97 Terraform-managed cloud resources.
Today
Independent, full-time
The same standards, offered directly: WordPress & CMS engineering, full-stack and AI development, performance work, and cloud & data consulting.
How I work
Async-friendly and spec-driven. Written scopes before code, milestone demos during, documentation at handoff. At the agency, I built and ran an internal fulfillment platform on this process — 200+ concurrent deliverables at ~60% less manual overhead. The same process runs solo today. I use AI tooling in my own workflow — architecture drafts, review passes, automation — but every line that ships is reviewed and owned by me. Problems get flagged early, in writing. The result is code the next engineer won't curse at.
Credentials
Sergio V. de la Garza — B.Eng. Computer Systems Engineering & MIS, Universidad Tecmilenio (Monterrey, 2000–2005)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate
- IBM Certified: Node.js Application Developer
- IBM Certified: Data Analyst
- Top Rated on Upwork — $100K+ earned, 7,000+ hours billed
- Open source: github.com/m4k00 (querychat, openledger, tiempodefila)
Upgrade-safe, or it doesn't ship.
No core edits, no parent-theme edits, no black boxes.
Numbers over adjectives.
Every project closes with measurements, not adjectives.
Documented handoffs.
The next developer — maybe you — can take over cleanly.
I operate what I build.
One of my products has run in production with paying customers since 2024. Support isn't a department — it's me.
Let's work together.
Tell me what you're solving. I reply within one business day.
No sales call. If it's not a fit, I'll say so.