About
I'm a data scientist and engineer. The work started in 2010 — crime prediction models for the Mexico City police, everything running through Excel macros and Matlab — and has gone through government, startups, consulting, and public-sector AI since then. The common thread is building things that ship and getting organizations to act on what the data says. Currently leading AI strategy for the Government of El Salvador, based in San Salvador.
Applied Mathematics undergrad, Data Science M.Sc. — both at ITAM in Mexico City. I taught there for four years while working full-time. The career posts cover the longer version.
Career
2024 — Present
AI Lead Consultant
Government of El Salvador
AI strategy across healthcare (DoctorSV), education reform, and government services. 5G network optimization under USAID and EU-funded engagements. The work is less about any one model and more about which levers actually exist inside large public institutions — and whether you can move them.
2022 — 2024
Staff Software Engineer
Kavak
Led the Data Engineering team — pipelines, cloud infrastructure, the work that keeps analytics functional when the company is operating across multiple countries. The engineering constraints were real.
2018 — 2022
Software Designer / Data Scientist
Globant
Computer Vision, NLP, Anomaly Detection — different clients, different industries. Mentored the Mexico data science team. Consulting means being useful to an organization you don't fully understand yet. That skill transfers.
2016 — 2018
Data Science Manager
Cultura Colectiva
Built the data science team from scratch. We were doing content evaluation and generation work before any of the current tooling existed — the hard way. Most of the company's BI ran through the team. In September 2017 the same team pivoted to build Verificado19s, a real-time data verification platform for the Mexico City earthquake. It's still the most important thing I've worked on, and it isn't close.
2016
Data Science Lead — Data Lab
Presidency of Mexico — Open Data Initiative
A centralized team inside the federal government: find the problem, build the solution, ship it. Cloud infrastructure for analytical workloads across multiple agencies. Short stint, real work.
2015 — 2016
Data Scientist / Data Engineer
Globant · OPI Analytics
Distribution optimization at Globant — tight constraints, real money, discrete math, no neural nets. At OPI, full-picture startup engineering: Docker when it was still raw, cloud ops, Ruby, Node, Mongo, Postgres, the whole pipeline from nothing to shipped.
2010 — 2015
Data Analyst
Center for Emergency Attention and Citizen Protection, Mexico City
First job out of university. Crime prediction models, weekly officer evaluations, a pipeline that ran through Excel macros and Matlab. The math was the easy part. Designing something a commander could act on at 6am — that was the job.
Teaching
ITAM · 2020–2024
- NoSQL for Data Science (M.Sc.)
- Introduction to Programming for Data Science (M.Sc.)
- Applied Analysis in Computational Mathematics
Selected Publications
- 2019 Esquinca, Escalante et al. Recomendaciones para Sociedad Civil. Google Play Store.
- 2016 Martinez, Escalante, Beguerisse-Díaz et al. Understanding Human Behavior in Urban Spaces. IJWSR.
- 2013 Prieto, Escalante et al. Análisis Criminal y Uso de Cámaras de Seguridad en la CDMX. Buenas Prácticas para el Análisis Delictual en América Latina.
San Salvador now, Mexico City before that. Trail, camera, mezcalería. I'm easier to reach by email than through any form.