Sebastian Barrios, former Mercado Libre engineering leader and Roblox SVP, discusses his early teenage programming projects and interactions with Apple.
“I'm happy to say there is an app store rule that is, was made specifically for me at the time.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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More from Sebastian Barrios
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Barrios: Mercado Libre has fewer than 1,000 PMs across 18,000 developers
“So I think it's less than 1000.”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 10:09Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Disclosure
Mercado Libre uses AI agents on existing microservices to build features
“We basically can extract the functionality of every single one of our microservices. And then we can have agents build and use different parts of different services and create new features. For users end to end with a UI.”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 17:34Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Opinion
Barrios: Radical candor is vital in Latin America to counter hierarchical deference
“I would even say it's even more important in Latin America in some Asian countries. Where you have a culture, and I'm Latin American, so I can talk a little bit about stereotypes without it becoming offensive especially ones that are true, where there's a lot …”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 34:47Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Insight
Barrios: Companies should not be run like families due to performance requirements
“This idea of, well, the companies should be like families and it's not true because you behave extremely different with your family. There's no expectation of high performance.”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 37:35Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
AssertionSupported
Barrios: Mercado Libre employs over 18,000 developers
“That is the right number. 18,000 and climbing. I just put specify that they don't report all directly to me. We can talk about how the company is structured, but yes, I lead the technology team that basically powers all of what they do.”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 5:36Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
Disclosure
Barrios: Mercado Libre does not tolerate leaders who lack deep technical details
“There's not a lot of tolerance for being in a meeting and getting asked the questions like, well, I need to check with this person to understand the details. Cause you know, I'm not sure what technology we're using, like That, that would not fly.”
Sebastian BarriosJun 8, 2025▶ 11:32Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
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