Software engineer · Portugal
Hello! I'm a software engineer in Portugal. I've spent seven years on the parts of a product that have to keep working: the data model, the API, the app people actually touch, and the server holding it all up. My favourite kind of work starts as a vague idea on a call and ends as something real that people use.
When I'm not coding or tinkering with my own projects, I'm probably playing tuba, sat behind a drum kit, or out somewhere getting my heart rate up.
Available for freelance and contract work
An app that keeps track of what's in your kitchen, warns you before food goes off, and builds the shopping list as things run low. It's on the Play Store, a household can share one pantry, and scanning a barcode fills in the product for you.
I built all of it and I run it: the API, the mobile app, the payments, and the server it lives on.
Django · DRF · Celery · PostgreSQL · React Native · Stripe · Hetzner
Interval training, but for practising an instrument. Musicians photograph or upload their sheet music, crop out the tricky bars, and a guided player runs them through it with a timer and a metronome. It keeps working when the phone loses signal.
The client got a fixed quote for each phase, a working app at the end of each one, and written documentation at handover.
Django · DRF · Celery · PostgreSQL · React Native · OpenAPI · Docker
Full-stack Engineer
LEAF is a multi-tenant platform that universities and public-sector organisations use to crawl, inventory, score and fix their entire web estate. Harvard, UC Irvine and Edinburgh are among the institutions running on it. I work across seven services: a React front end, an Express gateway, a Flask core API, separate authentication, AI and rendering services, and a distributed crawler on Kubernetes, with Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Redis and Celery underneath. Most of what I do sits where those services meet, and I own features from the database migration out to the interface.
I've built most of what the company actually sells: Stripe and wire-transfer billing with tiered limits, a token system for AI-assisted PDF remediation, a policy engine with approvals and audit trails, and around sixteen reports over Elasticsearch, from accessibility and security headers to certificate expiry and a composite LEAF Score, each one drillable from domain down to a single page.
The scale is the interesting part: millions of pages per client, thousands of subdomains, and domains shared between tenants who must not see each other's data. I moved the crawler fleet onto Kubernetes with queue-driven autoscaling, cleared a worker deadlock and the memory limits behind it, and took the cluster from about four nodes down to two or three. I measure before I optimise. A quota endpoint that timed out at twelve seconds turned out to be loading huge JSON columns through the ORM rather than running a bad query, and it now answers in under a millisecond.
I'm also the one on the weekly client calls. I listen to what is not working, turn it into something scoped, and say what we should build next and what can wait. That conversation shapes the product as much as any of the code above. We deliver with AI in the loop, using Claude Code and Copilot as part of the workflow rather than as a novelty.
React · TypeScript · Flask · Celery · Elasticsearch · PostgreSQL · Redis · Kubernetes
Founder
My own microgreens company, supplying restaurants in Figueira da Foz. The engineering was the greenhouse itself: I built a web app running on a Raspberry Pi that ran the whole thing, controlling irrigation, lighting, ventilation and humidity. It managed itself from a schedule and sensor readings, and I could take over from the app whenever I wanted to.
That turned a job needing daily attention into a reliable weekly harvest, and let one person run the lot, from the growing to dealing with the restaurants.
Flask · PostgreSQL · Raspberry Pi · Shell
Junior Software Engineer
A payments gateway, where an outage costs merchants money from the moment it starts. I worked on the core processing API: authorisation, payment, settlement, refunds and reconciliation. Correctness matters there as much as uptime, because every one of those steps has to still agree with the others at the end of the day.
With two colleagues I also built the company's first Android application, integrating that API on payment terminals and working to the PCI PIN Security Requirements.
Django · React · Kotlin · PostgreSQL · RabbitMQ · Docker
Junior Software Engineer
Clinical software, used by people with a patient in front of them. I worked mainly on the inpatient care side of the web application, keeping it running and turning what hospitals asked for into features that met the rules a medical product has to follow.
A good part of my time went on moving the product off Flash and onto JavaScript and Angular, screen by screen, without disrupting the hospitals already using it.
AngularJS · ActionScript 3 · Java
BSc Computer Science Engineering
Faculty of Sciences. I was part of NUCC, the computer science student group, and ran the logistics for UPDATE, a two-day run of workshops and talks for the department.
Tell me what you're building, roughly when you need it, and what finished looks like to you. I'll give you a straight answer about scope, what it would cost and whether I'm the right person, usually within two working days.