Building payroll and workers comp solutions for thousands of blue-collar businesses? Yeah, it really does take a village. And at COMPEO, we’re lucky to have some pretty amazing people making it all happen.
Today we want to shine a spotlight on Felipe Valencia, our Lead Engineer from Zarzal, Valle del Cauca, Colombia, whose journey with us showcases what happens when exceptional Colombian talent meets genuine commitment to mission.
Engineering Excellence from Colombia
Felipe brings serious credentials to the table. Currently pursuing a Master’s in Software Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes—considered one of Colombia’s most prestigious universities—and with a degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad del Valle, he features over six years of experience architecting and building enterprise software solutions. When our parent company OCMI was launching its engineering operations, Felipe’s expertise made him a natural fit to help establish our digital foundation and first customer-facing platforms.
Building the Foundation
Felipe’s early projects with us were all about laying the groundwork for growth. He helped create our online presence and built the initial customer platform for certificate requests and timesheets. From there, he dove into our proprietary CRM system, comprehensive onboarding platform, and the first iterations of our mobile applications. Each project built on the last, and Felipe’s work became the technical backbone that enabled our 100% year-over-year growth during those critical early periods.
What really set Felipe apart was how he continued to involve himself in new challenges across the company. As our needs evolved, so did his contributions—always stepping up to tackle whatever technical hurdle came next.
Solving Problems Before We Knew We Had Them
Here’s where Felipe’s proactive mindset really shone through. Without any instruction—just pure commitment to improving our operations—he identified a major pain point we didn’t even realize was holding us back.
All of our customer submissions for quotes, certificates, timesheets, employee onboarding, and more were coming in via email. Sounds manageable, right? Wrong. Submissions were getting lost, arriving malformed, and creating chaos across departments. Felipe saw the problem and built the solution: OCMI Forms.
This wasn’t just a quick fix—Felipe architected a complete data warehouse that acts as a proxy for storing all form submissions locally. The system lets us query data, generate reports, assign submissions to specific users, and manages forms across all our websites with multi-tenant functionality. But he didn’t stop there. Felipe built in automated workflows for sending reminders, providing feedback to users, and routing submissions to the right departments automatically.
OCMI Forms became a game-changer for our operations. Felipe’s initiative in building this solution on his own, without waiting for instructions, demonstrated his exceptional commitment to the company. That’s when we knew we had someone truly special on our hands.
Rebuilding Mobile from Scratch
When we launched our first mobile apps, our CTO Cristian Herrera—also Colombian, from Manizales, Caldas—quickly realized they weren’t meeting the quality standards our customers deserved. Instead of settling for “good enough,” we decided to rebuild from the ground up. Felipe stepped up to lead this massive initiative.
Drawing on his years of experience and software architecture knowledge, Felipe completely reimagined our mobile platform. He handled everything from technical architecture and stakeholder communication to cloud vendor management and technology assessments. The result? A solid and efficient platform that delivered single-click updates across all mobile apps, consolidated multiple codebases into one unified system, and accelerated our development speed by 300%.
This new platform eliminated nearly 30% of manual labor through automation and led to an 80% increase in mobile app adoption. More importantly, it helped us boost weekly employee onboarding by 30%—directly contributing millions in additional tax revenue that supports public infrastructure, small business programs, and education for blue-collar America.
Leading the Future
Felipe’s technical achievements tell only part of his story. His leadership skills, demonstrated by managing teams of up to 17 engineers, and commitment to mentoring others caught Cristian’s attention, leading to his promotion to Lead Engineer. Today, he works directly with him, leading a team of over 30 engineers and continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the PEO industry.
What we love most about Felipe is how he embodies our mission. This talented Colombian engineer doesn’t just write code—he builds solutions that help blue-collar businesses thrive. With his continued leadership and that same proactive spirit that brought us OCMI Forms, we can’t wait to see what innovations he’ll surprise us with next as we keep serving the industries that build America.
OCMI takes pride in recognizing the talent and dedication of Colombian professionals like Felipe Valencia, who has demonstrated that excellence knows no borders and that Latin American talent can lead technological innovation in American companies. This Colombian duo has created an environment where national talent thrives and contributes to the success of a company that has achieved multiple placements on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list.
