XFXosé Fernández

Curriculum vitae · Updated 2026

Xosé Fernández

Systems & Infrastructure Engineer
Linux · Virtualization · Storage · Networking

Download CV · PDF

Profile

Systems and infrastructure engineer focused on Linux, virtualization, storage and networking, with a security background and a PhD in digital forensics. I design systems, investigate failure modes and performance, and build practical tooling around what I find.

Experience

Senior Research Engineer

Gradiant

  • Designed and implemented a distributed real-time microservices processing system in Python for video and audio streams, handling ingestion, queuing (RabbitMQ), detection, and result delivery through a web interface. Deployed on Google Cloud Platform with Kubernetes.
  • Architected the system for horizontal scalability: each component (gateway, detectors, database, web) runs as an independent Docker container, designed to scale without architectural changes.

Research Engineer

Gradiant

  • Researched and developed a browser-based detection system for video injection attacks in remote identity verification processes.
  • The system detects virtual cameras (9 programs tested on Windows and Linux), video capture cards, and Android emulators by analyzing device configuration parameters exposed through JavaScript and WebGL — without inspecting the video stream itself.
  • Validated the solution across 12 laptops (3 manufacturers), 18 mobile devices (7 manufacturers), with 100% detection accuracy.
  • Went from project kickoff to a fully working detection library and an accepted talk at RootedCON Madrid 2025 in 8 months — becoming the first Gradiant employee to speak at the conference.

University Lecturer (Teaching Assistant)

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

  • Taught operating systems, TCP/IP networking, routing, DNS, and database systems to engineering students.
  • Consistently recognized by students for making complex systems concepts accessible and clear.

Predoctoral Researcher

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

  • Conducted applied research in digital forensics: examined browser internals on Linux and Android, analyzed ransomware samples, and built tools to recover encryption keys directly from memory.
  • Hands-on work with Linux at the filesystem and memory level, low-level debugging, and systems instrumentation.
  • Funded through two competitive grants: FPU (Spanish Government) and Xunta de Galicia predoctoral grant.

Researcher

Universidade da Coruña, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela & CESGA

  • Worked on applied research combining numerical methods with computational techniques for electrical impedance tomography (EIT).
  • Developed approaches to solve the inverse problem in tomographic imaging, producing results published in a peer-reviewed journal (Electronics, MDPI).

Engineering Intern — Talentum Startups (Telefónica)

CiTIUS, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

  • Scholarship program sponsored by Telefónica, with work conducted at CiTIUS (Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes).
  • Deployed a distributed system for real-time storage, processing, and analysis of sensor data from a smart building.
  • Integrated batch and real-time data pipelines using Apache Hadoop, Storm, Kafka, Cassandra, and ZooKeeper.
  • The system provided real-time query responses combining historical and live sensor data.

Infrastructure Intern

CESGA (Galicia Supercomputing Center)

  • Benchmarked and optimized I/O performance on a new Big Data cluster (2 racks, 19 servers each) with SSD storage and 10GbE networking.
  • Tested RAID configurations (RAID 0, 1, 6, 10 — hardware and software with md/LVM) to maximize IOPS on ServeRAID M5210 controllers with FastPath, reaching ~495K IOPS read.
  • Tuned Linux kernel profiles (balanced, network-latency, network-throughput) and measured impact on MapReduce workloads (TeraSort with up to 2TB) across a 15-node HDP cluster, achieving up to 30% improvement in sort times.
  • Built Bash scripts to automate benchmark execution and monitor disk health across the cluster using clush (clustershell).
  • Worked directly with server hardware: BIOS configuration, IMM (Integrated Management Module), and storage controller tuning.

Personal project

PVE Forge

Provisions disposable Proxmox VMs from mutable ZFS-backed base VMs, including linked and full clones, static addressing, firewall isolation, PCI passthrough and dependency-aware snapshot cleanup.

Selected publications