Gonçalo Amaral

Work progression

In late 2018, I started working at TheLoopCo as one of the first tech hires. Since there were limited people, I had the chance to work/explore the entire stack, from building frontends and backends to managing CI pipelines and Kubernetes clusters. And as knowledge stacked up, had the chance to advise other teams and mentor other members.

At some point, I felt it was time to change. So in 2021, I decided to join another startup Maven. I wanted to experience remote work and be involved in a product centric company with a more experienced team. Once again, the team is small and a bit of everything has to be done.

Motivations

My best work is done when independence, ownership and impact is valued and encoraged. I enjoy a good challenge like fixing a difficult bug, diving into unknown code or systems and finding ways to prevent the issue from happening again or at least reduce friction. Although I have worked across the stack my favorite area is backend.

Work experience and responsibilities

Maven Software Engineer - 2021 to Present (3 years)

Simplified infrastructure and code architecture (cost reductions of 35%)
Optimized pet activity ingest pipelines to meet time deadlines (1s processing time)
Setup error tracking and open telemetry (reduced production errors close to 0 and debugging times)
Built many pet health monitoring workflows
Assembled many internal core libraries

Technologies NodeJS, Golang, Microservices, GRPC, MySQL, Kubernetes, AWS, Vue

TheLoopCo Team Leader, Sysadmin and Software Engineer - 2018 to 2021 (3 years)

Ticketing Platform Team Leader and Software Engineer

Built real-time seat picking system
Designed venue builder (mostly svg manipulation with custom virtual DOM for performance)
Built dynamic forms builder and renderer with field validations (back-office and frontend)
Integrated client services APIs and implemented caching policies
Mentoring (3 junior developer)

Technologies Rails, Redis, PostgreSQL, Azure, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Lua, WebSockets

DevOps Sysadmin

Bootstrapped and maintained self-hosted services (Kubernetes cluster, Sentry and OpenVPN)
Optimized CI pipelines (docker build times below 5 min)
Mentoring (1 junior developer and 1 summer intern)

Technologies Docker, Kubernetes, Sentry, Gitlab CI

Some personal projects

More projects can be found on my GitHub.

Personal Blog

It is a tech centric blog where I publish my notes of topics I explored.

FUSE Filesystem

Filesystem based on FUSE.

Technologies Go

Blockchain

Proof of work blockchain.

Technologies Go

Cache replacement policies

Popular cache replacement policies.

Technologies Go