Javier Castañeda finished his Telecommunication Engineering at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2004. After several years working in the private sector, in 2006 he joined the Gaia project as researcher at the Institute of Cosmos Science of the Barcelona University (ICCUB). Since then, he has led the design, development and execution of one of the main data processing systems of the Gaia mission which is operated in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). In the meantime, he achieved in 2008 the Master Degree in Computational Astronomy and completed his PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Barcelona in 2015. Apart from his work in the Gaia mission, he participated in 2013 in the foundation of DAPCOM Data Services S.L., a UB and UPC spin-off company specialised on data compression software and the provision of tailored and integrated data handling solutions, where he participates as a technical advisor.