zezam

August 2021 — Current

I joined zezam to lead the Backend engineering team (2 people full-time + 2 part-time); the role involved setting up and evolving the team’s processes, notably:

• the implementation of a mostly async communication process, which gave engineers time to focus on development;
• establishing a weekly sync meeting to organize engineering efforts across the engineering teams (Frontend and Backend);
• supporting the company’s business by estimating feature complexity and suggesting alternatives or new features based on technical capabilities.

The company worked in fully remote fashion and, during my time there, pivoted through several business models:

1. providing a white-label, B2B application for managing fitness and welness studios;
2. a B2C SaaS offering of an e-commerce focused link-in-bio;
3. a B2C SaaS offering to make affiliate marketing more accessible for social media influencers.

My most notable technical contributions to the product were:

• an ordering system, which allowed both payment systems (PayPal and Stripe) as well as product types to be introduced as plugins;
• a subscription management system, based on Chargebee;
• an accounting ledger to track user earnings, as well as the batch processes to ingest the data from partner APIs.

Open Publishing

May 2019 — April 2021

I was the first Open Publishing hire for a newly founded team based in Faro, Portugal. As a team lead, I was responsible for:

• collaborating on HR matters related to the team (hiring, procuring office space, etc.);
• coaching team members in both technical areas and soft skills;
• being an individual contributor to both technical design and implementation.

I worked remotely for this role in the local team of 3 people, which was part of a larger team of 10 people, spread across 3 locations.

My contributions included:

• supporting some of the production infrastructure and almost all of the non-production one, including:
  • Elasticsearch clusters;
  • MySQL databases;
  • Docker Swarm Clusters;
  • Secret management and rotation (certificates and passwords);
  • User accounts;
  • Monitoring (Prometheus);
• developing and supporting Python-based services;
• bug fixing in the core C++ application;
• designing and implementing CD pipelines using Gitlab.

RegTech Company (through Polarising)

January 2018 — February 2019

This project’s main focus was modernizing the company’s applications and delivery processes. It also included ensuring GDPR compliance and preparing for security certification.

I worked remotely for this project, as part of a team of 6 people.

My contributions included:

• designing much of the standard automated delivery process;
• implementing several micro-services for integrating with third-party services;
• implementing a new, major service for case management.

Business Intelligence Company (through Growin)

July 2015 — March 2017

This project focused on replacing a legacy reporting application that was having trouble scaling.

A key part of the project was replicating information from an RDBMS into a scalable webservice, which would become the data backbone for both the new reporting application and other future client facing products.

Banking Software Company (through agap2)

January 2014 — November 2015

This project revolved around modernizing much of the company’s outdated software infrastructure, specifically in terms of application front-end development and delivery practices.

I helped design and create a framework prototype for front-end development, using Servlet-based Java for the server-side and Javascript (angular.js) on the client-side. I also implemented most of the Continuous Integration infrastructure for developing, testing, and deploying a sample application using the framework described above, using Ansible and XLDeploy.

Coreworks

March 2012 — June 2013

At the beggining of 2012, following my interest to work in embedded systems, I took the opportunity offered to me by Coreworks to work for them as a software engineer.

The team had five software engineers and three hardware engineers, for a total of eight people. The company was kicking off a project for a major electronics company, eventually selecting me as software team leader to organize software development efforts and allow the company’s administrators to focus on management.

During this time, at my suggestion, the company adopted some elements of Kanban to help support its development activities. In the scope of this project, I was also required to provide customer support.

Besides being involved in the company’s core audio codec development (particularly on the frontend), I implemented automated build, test and delivery procedures and managed much of the IT infrastructure.

Deloitte

February 2010 — August 2011

My first professional experience was at Deloitte, working part-time on a Java Web-based Customer Relationship Management application as part of a team of three people. The internship provided me with lots of learning opportunities on the basics of application development and business in general. My main contributions to the project during this time were on the technical level, specifically bug fixing.

After six months as an intern, Deloitte hired me to work full-time for them on the same project. My time in this position allowed me to further my learning in application development and also my soft skills, since I became involved with feature development and had to deal with our users, mostly to do requirements’ analysis and present prototypes. Besides fixing some more bugs, I developed parts of the billing module, in particular the provisions’ related features.

Towards the end of my colaboration with Deloitte, I was responsible for the development of REST webservices meant to be consumed by a mobile application being developed by another team, as well as SOAP services to interact with a middleware solution, also being developed by another team.