Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto

Engineering Manager

I'm responsible for the Engineering part of the Communication — chat, notifications — Crew (30+ engineers) inside the Trust Tribe. I have the direct reporting lines of four Engineering Managers and a Staff Engineer. We aim to "Empower users to connect, fostering impactful interactions seamlessly." Key metrics:

* 190 million notifications delivered per day
* More than 5 million conversations and 17 million messages are handled per day by the chat system

My role is to:

* Organize the Crew for maximum efficiency and delivery, balancing short and long-term goals
* Grow Engineering Managers and Individual Contributors to ensure continuous development and success
* Oversee project execution and ensure alignment with overall Trust Tribe objectives
* Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to improve system performance and user experience

Cross-tribe projects I contributed to:

* Define a company-wide career framework for Product and Tech
* Define a "Platform Engineer" profile that simplifies the landscape of "DevOps" and "Site Reliability" Engineers in the company, both for career progress purposes and salary benchmarks
* Mentor other Engineering Managers across the organization

Adevinta

Head of Engineering

I lead the Runtime team (15 people) inside the Cloud Platform tribe. I am accountable for the delivery through OKRs, technical quality, and stakeholder
communication. I set the team members' goals and am responsible for their performance reviews. Main achievements:

• Made the Runtime team a high-performing team and "Elite DevOps". From one to more than ten deployments a week, delivering value iteratively to our customers. I leveraged the four key metrics from the DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA) group to help transform the team’s culture;
• Hiring, partnering with Talent Acquisition, doing "selling" calls to more than 30 candidates, and getting five new hires in three months;
• 100% YoY growth in the platform’s usage, serving more than 70 tenants and with average traffic of 50k requests per second (rps) and 120k at peak time;
• Sped up the onboarding process from six to one month, with dedicated sessions for all new team members;
• Ensuring transparency of the quality of service by establishing and upholding Service Level Indicators and Objectives (SLIs/SLOs) for SCHIP, a Kubernetes runtime;
• Led the execution of substituting an in-house observability solution for a SaaS one. I aligned with the vendor and other stakeholders and led the migration end-to-end for nine months;
• Managing a budget of 10+ million euros/year in Public Cloud spending while having a sub-linear growth regarding the Platform usage;
• Redefined our tribe’s all-hands (50+ people) to generate more engagement with our employees and to ensure the leadership team delivered the intended message;
• 8.1/10 in OfficeVibe’s "relationship with manager" (Trust, Collaboration and Communication indicators).

Senior Engineering Manager

I lead two teams: Common Platform Runtime (CPR) and Resilience (12 people), inside the Platform
Services Tribe. I am accountable for the delivery through OKRs, technical quality, and stakeholder
communication. I set the goals for the team members, and I am responsible for their performance reviews.

I led two teams: Automation and Core Technology (6 and 7 engineers) within FREENOW’s Supply vertical. I am accountable for the delivery, technical quality, and communication with the Product Manager, and other stakeholders. Also, I set the goals for the team members, and I am responsible for their performance review.

Main achievements:

+ Reduced cloud computing spending by 70%;
+ Led a team that delivered 99.95+% of uptime in the Supply vertical, in 2019; (less than 5h downtime across the year) 
+ 8.0/10 in OfficeVibe's "relationship with manager" (Trust, Collaboration and Communication indicators);
+ Spoke at three conferences (JBCN 2019, BCN Software Crafters 2019 and Commit Conf 2019) both about technology and management experiences;
+ Implemented a Request for Comments process to empower our engineering team and make it excel. As of May 2020, we have more than 50 RFCs, and RFPs created;
+ Defined and led a Continuous Deployment strategy for our micro-services;
+ Delivered a GDPR right-to-be-forgotten scalable solution for 300+ services.

FREE NOW (formerly mytaxi)

Decoupling of the job board platform [InfoJobs.net] monolithic architecture into a microservices one. Automation of deployment, testing and monitoring pipelines to ensure the reliability of InfoJobs' systems. 

Heavily contributing to bring the best practices to the company and pushing for software craftmanship, in order to allow business to go faster and more reliably.

Main technologies: Java 8, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Netflix OSS stack, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Python, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jenkins, Bash

Development of the job board platform that powers InfoJobs. Software craftmanship evangelist and bringing the best software engineering practices to the team.

Main technologies: Java 7, Spring, PL/SQL (Oracle)

Schibsted Classified Media

Software Engineer

Development of REST API for Blueliv's cyber-security solution, with focus in information retrieval, modularity and scalability.
Development of micro-services to handle different sources of information gathering. Development of plugins to interoperate with 3rd-party System Information and Event Management software.

Main technologies: Java, Spring, Akka, MongoDB, Solr and Python

Blueliv

Full-stack developer of "Cupenya Insights", a software that delivers predictive analytics and real-time visibility in the businesses processes performance.
Full-stack developer of "Kioo Mobile", a mobile software app to track workflows and task completion performance.

Main technologies: Scala, Spray, Akka, MongoDB, CoffeeScript & AngularJS

Cupenya

In the Ambient Assisted Living context, I developed a fully-distributed, fault-tolerant and
self-managed middleware solution which goal was to orchestrate and manage several sensors
and actuators all over a patient house. Third-party drivers were supported.

Main technologies: were Scala, Akka and RabbitMQ. 

More information here: http://joaoqalves.net/thesis

INESC Technology and Science - Associate Laboratory coordinated by INESC Porto

Intern

Active Member of AlumniEI-FEUP, an alumni non-profit association which aims to promote FEUP's Informatics and Computing engineers both nationally and internationally. I've been helping organizing talks with companies and meetups between alumni.

AlumniEI-FEUP

Active Member

Analyst and back-end developer of "Tymr", a social-network for events. My main tasks were to model the domain and to help with a mid-term vision of the system's architecture.
I've helped to build the first version of the API, giving 3rd-party access to "Tymr"s data.

Main technologies: Python, Web2Py & MongoDB

tymr

API and Mobile Engineer

Project under the "Program of Initiation to Research at the University of Porto" which was
meant to help the biologists at IPATIMUP. This project was supervisioned by Professor Rui
Camacho, PhD. During the time that I was involved, I developed of several tools whose goal was to facilitate the task of creation and analysis of phylogenetic trees of mitochondrial DNA by IPATIMUP's biologists. Furthermore, I also developed a web interface to facilitate the use of the tools.

Main technologies: Python, PHP \& MySQL

IPATIMUP

Developer

I developed a software application to manage the "Centro Novas Oportunidades" at my school (Ancorensis, Cooperativa de Ensino - http://www.ancorensis.pt). Technologies used: ASP, HTML, CSS, jQuery, MySQL, SQL Server

João Alves