Áurea Paola
Rodríguez Barrón

I run IT operations for banking, data centers, manufacturing and tech companies, and I've done it for more than 19 years from Mexico City. I build efficiencies with lean methods across infrastructure, operations and software development, keep teams compliant with ISO and SOX, and lead multicultural teams across LATAM and the USA with agile and design thinking.

Global Ops Lead at PepsiCo

19+years in IT operations and transformation

160Kservers supported from L1 to L3 at IBM

1,000+employees served by the IT team I led at Flowserve

20+mid and large projects, including LATAM rollouts

Experience

My career racked like a data center cabinet. Each rack unit is one year: 21U from my first IT role in 2005 at the bottom to today at the top.

APRB-21UMEX-CDMX

PepsiCo2026–

Microsoft2024–26

Lyft2022–23

Citibanamex2020–22

IBM2019–20

EASSYMO2017–19 Luis Hoyo C.A.2015–17

Flowserve2005–15

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Global Ops Lead

2026 to today, current role

PepsiCo

Lead B2B application maintenance, updates and impact assessments aligned with global and sector strategy.
Drive the annual Technology Lifecycle Management roadmap and AOP alignment, and coordinate release planning with SAFe.
Partner across the SDLC with Product, Design, Delivery and Business teams, and push cost optimization, automation and productivity in customer support.

IT Ops Manager

2024 to 2026

MicrosoftMexico data centers

Managed the IT Ops team and PMs for Mexico's data centers, with SLA, SLO and OKR targets to the global standard and IT Ops budget control.
Worked with global teams to deploy racks on time and accept each phase of new data centers and expansions.
Collaborated with CE, safety, security, GPU and special-project teams.

Engineering Manager

2022 to 2023

LyftInfrastructure support

Set the roadmap and vision for a support team covering compute, networking, local environment, logging, datastores and dev pipelines.
Built a team diverse in expertise and background, and kept SLA, SLO and OKR health across teams.
Planned and ran automation projects that targeted chronic issues.

Head of Command Center

2020 to 2022

Citibanamex24×7 L1 support for mainframe and distributed infrastructure

Led managers through a growth mindset, positive leadership and feedback.
Reduced toil and adopted the SRE role under the global Citi framework, and backed standardization, automation and RPA.

IT Operations Manager

2019 to 2020

IBMAT&T account, 6 technologies, 160K servers

Improved global team productivity metrics by 30% by reassigning tasks per region with stakeholders.
Raised engineer productivity by 25% by finding process deviations and creating new metrics.
Increased attention to informal requests by 85% with a chat-scraping tool that classifies and routes work to each engineer.

Founder

2017 to 2019

EASSYMOAutomotive startup

Sold 1M MXN a month by landing new customers such as Kavak.
Built the team from scratch across development, QA, marketing, design and sales.

IT Manager

2015 to 2017

Luis Hoyo Custom Agency

Cut the main recurring ticket issues by 70% with a ticketing system and SLAs negotiated with the business.
Removed unlicensed-software risk through vendor negotiation and business cases.

IT Manager

2005 to 2015

FlowserveValves, seals and industrial pumps

Ran an IT department serving more than 1,000 employees and led 20+ projects, several of them LATAM implementations.
Specialized in ERP, MRP, CRM and operational KPIs and QPIs, and managed vendors, infrastructure, support and developers.

I became a leader instead of a manager, and I achieved some great things

30%of the people reporting to me got a promotion during their first year, on average

95%of SLAs achieved over the last 5 years

10+technologies managed in 4 years, such as AIX, HP-UX, cloud, pipelines and networking, across startups, big companies, finance, data centers and manufacturing

40+projects implemented across purchasing, sales, collections, warehouse, production, finance and engineering

About me

Outside the data center I'm many things at once.

Geek and travelerLearnerAuntSisterDoggie's momPartner

Selfie of Áurea on a plane with a pink cap and headphones — Geek and traveler

Áurea next to a chrome Mickey Mouse statue under neon lights — Learner

Two small white dogs asleep on a sofa — Doggie's mom

Áurea posing in front of a giant Pac-Man wall

Where I came from

I used to be introverted until I discovered how much fun and happiness you can find by socializing and developing empathy for others.

Áurea making a surprised face wearing Mario's cap

Things that grab my mind

Automating stuff: my garden, the coffee machine, tickets.
How we can become more productive as a team.
Personal situations that affect my team, and how I can help.
How we can create impact as a team, every day.

2005IT Manager

2017Cofounder, auto parts

2019IT Ops Manager

2020IT Ops Manager

2022Engineering Manager

2024IT Operations Manager

2026Global Ops Lead

The same path at a glance, from Flowserve to PepsiCo.

In a nutshell, the things I value most

Persistence

Hard work

Honesty

Human connection

Teamwork

I am excited to see how technology is changing the world

That's why I'm always curious about how things work.

I often ask how our end customers will be affected by our projects and work.

I look for ways to do more with the same or less effort.

My ideal job

The kind of team and work where I do my best.

Dynamic

Teamwork and collaboration

A team that inspires other teams

Solving the toughest problems

Things to improve? Great!

Chances to make a positive impact on customers

Room to be creative, and then automate

Toolkit

KPISix SigmaHardwareData centerSLA Design ThinkingITILStandardizationSAFe Programming and scriptinginfrastructureISO and SOX Customer Support EntrepreneurSLIAWS Cloud Practitionercloud DevOps and SRELean, Green BeltCustomer Obsessed processAutomation and RPAcontainersSLOAgile and WaterfallAdvanced English

People describe me as hands-on, focused and thick-skinned, with an eye on business strategy and the data behind it.