He was born in Mexico City and raised in the northern city of Monterrey, Nuevo León. Javier obtained his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, where he double-majored in Computer Science and Music, receiving departmental honors for a thesis on machine learning and formal music analysis. While a student, he was a researcher at Columbia’s Spoken Language Processing Group, a computer science teaching assistant, and a software engineering intern at Pinterest. As an intern, he was responsible for implementing an email scheduler that learned from users’ historical activity to maximize the likelihood of them positively interacting with emails. Javier is also an avid classical guitarist.