David Saltares
Senior Software Engineer at Kernel
Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Saltares is a seasoned senior software engineer and leader with 15 years’ experience building high-performing, trust-based teams and shipping reliable products at scale. Currently at Kernel after a recent interim CTO role, he has repeatedly transformed engineering organisations—introducing CD, scalable delivery practices, and expectations frameworks that boosted velocity, quality and team engagement. He combines hands-on full-stack engineering (from C++ game dev and real-time systems to modern web stacks) with strategic product and hiring leadership, having grown teams rapidly and led successful exits and large-scale platform migrations. An active open-source contributor, he has contributed to the well-known libGDX game framework, adding level loader/rendering and modernisations tied to hobbyist gamedev work with Godot. Based in Cluj-Napoca and remote-first, he pairs pragmatic engineering craftsmanship with coaching and inclusive culture-building that leaves teams more autonomous and resilient. Not obvious from titles: he repeatedly builds MVPs and production apps extremely quickly (e.g., a supermarket order app to stores in under a month), showing a bias for rapid, high-quality delivery.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Cádiz UniversityBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at Kingston University
Spanish, English, Romanian
Stackoverflow
818reputation
63kreached
6answers
15questions
Github Skills (19)
application-framework10
game-engine10
libgdx10
game-dev10
app-framework10
cross-platform10
java10
javas10
3d10
web-framework10
game-development10
2d10
flask6
callback6
android6
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
libgdx/libgdx
Nov 2012 - Feb 2016
Desktop/Android/HTML5/iOS Java game development framework
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer (Game Development)
Full-stack Developer (Game Development)Contributions:74 commits, 21 PRs, 24 pushes in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:David contributed significantly to the libGDX game development framework. Their work involved adding and integrating the GLEED2D level loader and renderer extension, enabling the loading and rendering of levels created with the GLEED2D editor. They also added touch controls to a GLEED test and made improvements to screen size handling within the test environment. Furthermore, they modernized the codebase and improved the GLEED map integration.
gamejava-game2dhtml5ios
dsaltares/finlight
Jul 2023 - Jul 2024
Finlight - budgeting app
Contributions:85 PRs, 92 pushes, 8 branches in 1 year
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.