Meet the Amara Team: Fran

Say hi to Fran! Fran is that person within the Amara team who does what no one else can do. You know how you start praying to the Viking gods when your WiFi connection says 'Connected, no internet', and no matter what you do, nothing works? Well, we pray to Fran. And he answers our prayers by always being able to fix anything or find an original solution to whatever deep space issue we throw at him. Sometimes, we think Fran might have superpowers.

Fran, could you share a little about you?

Hi. I'm Francisco Ontanaya, Technical Operations Manager for Amara. I'm from Valencia, Spain, currently living in a nice apartment outside the city in a large town called Torrent. I've been living here for most of my 41 years, although I also spent a couple years in the Silesia Province in Poland. I'm a programmer by trade, with a bit of linguistics background.

Coffee or tea? Cats or dogs? Mountains or sea?

I'm very much a cat guy. Cats and I understand each other, probably because we have similar personalities. I'm usually their favorite even if it's someone else's pet! My favorite warm drink is hibiscus tea, and certainly love living by the Mediterranean sea.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

Watching science fiction movies, home improvement, baking homemade bread, reading about astronomy or playing some flavor of zombie game.

If you could change one thing about the world to make it better, what would you do?

The world definitely needs a lot less cars, not just to reduce pollution but to make cities a lot more livable. There's billions of square meters covered in asphalt that could support mixed uses instead.

You're on a spaceship. About to have first contact with a new alien species. What's the first thing you tell them?

I'd probably ask what's their most delicious dish. Food is an interplanetary language.

Which dish would you serve to your new alien friends?

I'd have to mind their possible food preferences, so I'd go with a traditional Valencian vegetables paella, which is still very hearty and savory, and has artichoke, which is one of my favorite ingredients.

What's your favorite Sci-Fi series and why?

I'm more of an original Star Wars guy, Star Trek was a bit too soap opera for me :D If you asked me which is my favorite sci-fi live series from the 90's-00's, I'd say Farscape, I loved the humor and the mixed characters. Overall it'd be the 90's-00's Ghost in the Shell movies and series, they had pretty brainy plots and cool visuals.

How did you end up at Amara and what do you do here?

I was captioning as a volunteer for TED Talks when Amara posted that they needed someone urgently to do quality assurance on English captions. There were also a number of issues with the Timed Text format the captions were going to be exported to, and I had experience coding and dealing with XML, which turned out to be very handy.

After that I did caption reviewing for a year, and as the number of technical issues and special requests that I ended working on increased, I became the technical operations guy.

Currently I'm in charge of evaluating any unusual requirements from clients, including video formats and subtitle formats, resolving or helping diagnose technical issues, automating custom work or reports through Amara's API and third party APIs, and providing some video editing and open caption rendering that is often needed along the captioning itself.

What's your favorite thing about Amara and your role here?

For someone that works better without people around and had to live abroad for some of the time, and from a city in Spain that doesn't have a too exciting tech scene, being able to work remotely was immensely important. Amara had an international team way before the Covid pandemic made remote work "cool".

Caring for the operations side lets me work on code to solve a wide variety of problems without a lot of the formality of software engineering, which means you get to see immediate results.

How long have you been with Amara and why did you decide to make this your home?

I've been with Amara for nine years already, and hopefully for many more in the future. For me, Amara had the perfect mix of cool things to work on, and allowed me to interact with some big clients around the world I'd never thought I'd be working with until I joined this amazing team.