A Mexican software engineer has had his story featured on our partner website, Nearshore Americas, where his unique journey of moving from Mexico to the United States to work at Amazon offers personal insight into the demand for Mexican talent.

Originally hailing from Tampico, a small town of around 1 million people in Mexico, Isidro Hernandez has taken his computer engineering career from humble beginnings to the lofty heights of Amazon over the last decade and a half.

During his early days in Tampico, Hernandez was a student of Instituto Tecnologico de Ciudad Madero (The Technological Institute of Madero City), which is not hugely well-known in the country, but offers strong computer engineering courses, according to Hernandez.

“The university doesn’t get much publicity in Mexico, and most people would more likely choose Tec de Monterrey,” he said. “I chose this one based on word of mouth and found that the computer engineering course had a fantastic reputation, even winning a national contest against other institutes. It’s a great place to begin a career as a systems engineer.”

After making the decision to move to Monterrey, Isidro joined Indian tech giant Infosys as a Technology Lead through a recommendation from another person. At that time, Infosys was hiring a lot of people in Monterrey as it had only arrived one year before and was still growing.

“I was working on a project for a retailer in Seattle from Mexico, then talked to my manager about getting the opportunity to go on-site in the US,” he said. “At that moment, I wasn’t prepared, but they needed someone to fill a position in the US for a specific team, so I talked to my wife about the great compensation they were offering and we agreed to move to Seattle.”

Once settled in Seattle, Isidro landed a great job at e-commerce behemoth Amazon, where he became a Cloud support engineer.

Hernandez and his family are settled well in Seattle, and plan to stay in the city with Amazon. Ambitious as ever, he sees his next growth step as being a solutions architect.

To read Isidro’s full story on Nearshore Americas, click here.