Resume of Rui Baltazar

Rui Baltazar
Lead Software Engineer / CTO

About

I'm a Software Engineer with a Computer Science background, working in the industry since 2009. Thrilled by the start-up world, I'm an enthusiastic developer, proficient in getting things done. I never turn down a good challenge and I'm always seeking to learn. I believe that developers should actively contribute to OpenSource as a means to learn and give back to the community. On the free time, I'm a life lover by nature, play football on a regular basis and go out scuba-diving every now and then.

Work Experience

Zeus Living, Inc
https://zeusliving.com/
July 2022 – Present
Staff Engineer
Zeus Living is a tech enabled company and I have been working closely with the remaining engineers, solving operational problems and improving internal processes in order to reduce costs. My responsibilities include providing technical guidance and personnel development as well as career growth. Implementing best practices in the industry and bring in consistency in the process of software development
Highlights
  • Improved developer's experience by bringing some industry standards to the development process
  • Actively worked on reducing technical debt by removing unused code, DRYing some of the workflows and removing unnecessary hacks and patches
Perx - Lifestyle Marketing Platform
https://www.perxtech.com/
August 2019 – July 2022
Director of Engineering
Initially hired to work as the backend lead of a near greenfield project to then move and work on the long running platform version and finally taking the role of Director of Engineering. My responsibilities included scope of work and estimations, delivery planning, work assignment and hands-on coding. Lately as a Director of Engineering, I was in charge of technical discussions with customers before contract signing as well as initial integration discussions. On the people management side, I was responsible for a team of 12 engineers, which included data engineers, devops, backend and frontend. Since joining Perx, I have been highly involved in maintaining the open source Apartment gem that handles our multi-tenancy business logic.
Highlights
  • Added support for rails 6 to Apartment Gem which unblocked the long running platform from updating to rails 6.
  • Implemented read/write replica business logic in the long running platform
  • Fixed logging issues that caused a loss of ~20% of our logged requests
  • Actively worked on reducing our request latency, having contributed to a decrease it from an average of 600ms to 70ms
  • Introduced capability for refund transactions for our customers
  • Ensured transaction processing was kept under the internally agreed threshold of 1 hour
FirstTouch
https://www.firsttouch.io/
October 2016 – January 2019
CTO / Co-founder
FirstTouch was a Football network that meant to bring together football professionals and clubs, easing the career managing and the interaction between teams and its resources. I was the main full-stack developer of the platform. Backend was developed using Ruby on Rails and the frontend was running Vue.js
Highlights
  • Failed to launch my own startup. Quite a few learnings from the process
  • The whole platform was developed mostly by me using RoR for the backend and VUE.js for the frontend
OpsManager
https://www.opsmanager.com/
April 2014 – June 2019
Lead Software Engineer
Lead Software Engineer. Working as full stack developer, with special focus on frontend, as well as responsible for the whole software development cycles, upon agreement with the client. At the time the platform was developed using frameworks such as Knockout.js and Backbone. OpsManager relies heavily in indexedDB to support the offline capabilities of the web application
Highlights
  • Re-built the offline database syncing logic in order to reduce the synced data from 300MB to 10MB
  • Developed the querying library with capabilities to fetch records from IndexedDB or via API
  • Fully responsible for the maintenance and development of the offline-capable web application
  • Envisioned and developed the Android application for on-site data collection using Ionic
Intelllex
https://www.intelllex.com/
September 2015 – February 2016
Freelance Full-Stack Developer
Developed frontend and backend for case search module using Ruby on Rails (backend) and Knockout.js (frontend). Integrated the case search module with their other existing modules.
Highlights
  • Full-stack developer
  • Described and implemented development workflow for newcomers
  • Sysadmin work setting up and documenting the production environment deploy
SMART (MIT alliance)
https://smart.mit.edu/
November 2011 – April 2014
Senior Software Engineer
Full stack developer, as well as technology advisor for research support.
Highlights
  • Developed fully working web platform for people's mobility data collection (FMSurvey) in a partnership with LTA (Land Transport Authority)
  • Management of the development of both iOS and Android mobile applications used for the data collection
Ubiwhere, Lda
https://www.ubiwhere.com/
September 2009 – November 2011
Software Engineer
Software developer both for the main company and as outsourced resource.
Highlights
  • Development of Android mobile application in the context of Birdwatching
  • While outsourced working for PT Inovação, as Java developer: maintained and developed the SMS platform used by several network providers such as TMN, Meditel and CVMovel; Started developing automated tests on the platform using Ruby
  • Master thesis in AI for Ubiquitous Systems - a mobile application for guiding visually impaired people in cities, Blind City Guide.
  • Developed a keyboard solution for touchscreens to be used by visually impaired, using QT
  • Developed a social application for SonyEricsson mobile contest using JavaME
  • Beta-testing of on-going development applications

Awards

  • September 2013

    IDA Singapore

    IDA's Best Government Data Mash-Up

    Best use of any government dataset from another agency in combination with EMA & SP's datasets

Projects

  • ros-apartment: Drop-in replacement of apartment gem, developed for providing multi-tenancy solutions for Ruby on Rails projects
  • story_branch: Quickly create a feature branch based on the active stories in your PivotalTracker project, Github issues, JIRA tickets and Linear

Contact

Education

  • 2005 2010

    University of Coimbra

    Master

    Computer Science

    Courses
    • Artificial Intelligence for Ubiquitous Computing
    • OOP
    • Network Systems
    • AI Introduction
    • Operating Systems
    • Distributed Systems
  • 2008 2009

    Politechnika Bialostocka

    Master's exchange program

    Computer Science

    Courses
    • Cryptography
    • Robotics
    • Methods of Modelling

Publications

Battery Patterns and Forecasting in a Large-scale Smartphone-based Travel Survey
International Conference on Transport Survey Methods (ISTCST 2014)
21 September 2014

Interests

Scuba Diving
Divemaster
Sports
Football Handball Tennis