Software engineer focused on backend systems, infrastructure and product delivery
mail@diogo.site · Porto, Portugal
One-page résumé 1 page Download PDF
I am a computer scientist from Porto, Portugal, completing a PhD in Computer Engineering at the University of Porto. My work spans software engineering, dependable systems, distributed social platforms, robotics, aerospace computing, machine perception, spatial interaction and technical education.
I am strongest where a role needs both engineering depth and coordination maturity: turning ambiguous technical problems into architecture, milestones, implementation, documentation and team learning. I have led funded open-source software work, supervised students, contributed to aerospace and robotics contexts, and designed workshops and teaching material for Computer Science audiences.
I am open to software engineering, technical project/program management, applied research and Computer Science teaching roles — especially positions where ownership, mentoring, rigorous execution and research-to-product translation are valued.
Leadership style. I work well in high-agency teams: written decisions, explicit trade-offs, small milestones, visible risks and a bias toward maintainable systems rather than clever one-offs.
Technical communication. I can move between code, architecture, project plans, teaching material and stakeholder conversations. I care about making complex systems understandable enough that others can operate, extend and teach them.
Mentoring. I have mentored student developers and taught technical workshops. I treat mentoring as an engineering multiplier: better explanations reduce future coordination cost and improve quality.
Software, systems and research contexts
Engineering ownership. Led funded open-source platform development, coordinated contributors, made architectural decisions, and maintained a public-facing technical roadmap.
Research-to-system translation. Worked across dependable computing, robotics, machine perception and spatial interaction, keeping practical deployment constraints in view.
Milestones, stakeholders, risk and delivery
Execution discipline. I structure projects around clear goals, written decisions, risks, interfaces and incremental delivery.
Stakeholder fluency. I can communicate with engineers, researchers, students, institutional partners and non-technical decision-makers without losing technical precision.
Computer Science and engineering education
Teaching practice. Delivered workshops and talks on Git, dependable computing, embedded systems and decentralised networks.
Pedagogy. Completed evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching training and a Portuguese trainer certification, with a focus on active learning and practical technical competence.
Spectaria - spatial interaction platform for museums
A product initiative for reusable spatial media and interaction infrastructure in museums and cultural venues.
Stack: Projection-based AR, Pro-Cam calibration, computer vision, spatial interaction, interaction design, web application architecture, SQLite/SQL, Linux/Nginx, product strategy.
Apontamento Cordial
Full-stack software engineering. Built and maintained private/internal software projects for operational and training workflows, covering data modelling, backend logic, admin interfaces, reporting and maintainable documentation.
Optimisation and decision-support tools. Developed optimisation-oriented prototypes for scheduling, resource allocation and operational decision support, translating messy business constraints into pragmatic algorithms and usable web workflows.
Web development and automation. Implemented PHP/SQL/JavaScript features across existing systems; debugged, refactored and documented application logic so technical and non-technical stakeholders could adopt it safely.
Technical consulting and training. Analysed client systems, workflows and organisational needs; identified improvements; and translated requirements into actionable plans, training material and implementation support.
Stack: PHP, SQL/SQLite/MariaDB, JavaScript, HTML5/CSS3, Linux, Bash, Git, web application design, data modelling, optimisation, process automation, technical documentation.
GNU social — free-software social networking platform
Led the development of GNU social v3, funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 NGI0 Discovery Fund. The work required architecture, maintainability, accessibility, plugin extensibility, release planning and coordination with a public free-software community.
Mentored contributors and students, including Google Summer of Code participants, while keeping a long-running platform understandable and extensible.
Stack: PHP, Symfony, Doctrine ORM, SQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, Memcached, ActivityPub, ActivityStreams 2.0, WebFinger, HTML/CSS, ARIA, plugin architecture, Git.
GNU social
Organised Google Summer of Code (GSoC) at GNU social in 2019 and 2020, mentoring four students, and organised GNU social Summer of Code — a community-funded programme modelled on GSoC — mentoring one student in 2020. In the autumn term of 2020, GNU social was one of the projects in FEUP's Software Development Laboratory master's module (MIEIC-LDSO), where I helped mentor eight fourth-year informatics-engineering students.
Selected contributions with mentored students:
Google Summer of Code is a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into open-source software development through a three-month project with an open-source organisation.
Stack: PHP, Symfony, ActivityPub, OpenID, Redis, Memcached, query optimisation, caching, media storage, code review, mentoring.
Kult — venture-backed social-discovery startup (UPTEC)
As co-founder and CTO of Kult, a social-discovery product incubated at UPTEC, I owned the technical side end to end: product and architecture decisions, the engineering roadmap, team coordination and delivery under startup constraints. I led the funding applications that won the StartUP Voucher (full grant, IAPMEI) and a Grant for the Web flagship grant — turning an idea into a funded, building company.
Stack: Backend architecture, web application architecture, API design, database modelling, technical interviews, product engineering, startup delivery.
ANTAEUS CubeSat / LIP i-Astro / UC, UBI and University of Porto
Member of the ANTAEUS CubeSat on-board data-handling context, contributing to dependable computing and data-handling work for a 2U CubeSat mission in high-energy astrophysics.
The project was proposed by students from the University of Coimbra, University of Beira Interior and University of Porto, and was pre-selected for ESA’s Fly Your Satellite Design Booster programme. My work connected embedded constraints, reliability, interfaces, technical documentation and hardware/software coordination in an aerospace systems context.
Stack: Dependable systems, CubeSat on-board data handling, embedded interfaces, fault analysis, requirements reasoning, systems engineering, technical documentation, Git.
Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory (LSTS), FEUP
Supported by a research grant (BII) from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Our interdisciplinary student team further developed a low-cost autonomous surface vehicle, designed a docking station, and began work on a manoeuvre to enable autonomous docking in the LSTS toolchain. The manoeuvre uses a vector-field guidance algorithm to find the optimal trajectory and, when close to the station, tracks a target with the camera module. The vessel uses an IMU, a GPS, a camera and a Raspberry Pi 4.
Stack: Autonomous surface vehicles, Raspberry Pi, IMU, GPS, camera module, vector-field guidance, LSTS toolchain, robotics systems integration.
Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia (CTM), INESC TEC
With the advent of machine-learning methods there has been extensive research in human detection, tracking and activity recognition. Inherent to this is the analysis of human pose using skeleton models that connect information extracted from the scene to the human body — information that parametric human models can also use to create virtual 3D representations.
During this internship I surveyed the state of the art in parametric human-body models, implemented the infrastructure required to test them, and produced a final analysis and comparison. The work was distinguished as the best of the MCT category by the jury of the Summer@CTM 2022 internship programme.
Stack: Computer vision, machine-learning literature, parametric 3D human-body models, 3D representation, data analysis, experimental comparison, technical reporting.
Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Supervisor: Prof. João Tasso de Figueiredo Borges de Sousa.
Research area: software-intensive interactive systems, machine perception, spatial/projection-based interaction, robotics-adjacent sensing and systems engineering.
Relevant activities:
Key areas: Projection-based AR, Pro-Cam systems, computer vision, machine perception, spatial interaction, systems engineering, experimental design, LaTeX, technical writing.
Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto
180 ECTS, of which 54 ECTS in Mathematics.
Activities and societies:
Key contents:
Key areas: C, Java, Haskell, Prolog, SQL, Erlang, UNIX/shell, algorithms, data structures, concurrency, databases, networking, security, AI, numerical analysis, stochastic processes, control, signal processing.
European Space Agency (ESA) Academy, ESA ESEC
A training week introducing university students to the concurrent design of a CubeSat mission. Guided by ESA experts, students learn to use COMET (Concurrent Model-based Engineering Tool) and to identify design drivers; divided into teams, they first create a subsystem concept and then realise an identified mission concept, function tree and product tree using concurrent engineering.
Key topics:
European Space Agency (ESA) Academy, ESA ESTEC
ANTAEUS, a prospective Fly Your Satellite! Portuguese team, attended this training week to deepen its knowledge of spacecraft design and project management.
Covered topics included: project management principles and COTS; legal aspects of CubeSat missions; communications and outreach; systems engineering principles; AIV and testing; introduction to MBSE; data-handling subsystem design and verification; flight-software development; EPS design and verification; structural, thermal and mechanisms design and verification; project management for CubeSats; AOCS design and verification; spacecraft operations; TT&C and ground segment; RAMS of CubeSats (FMEA, HSIA, FDIR); space-debris mitigation and trackability; and CubeSat mission analysis — delivered by ESA specialists including Alexander Kinnaird, Tomasz Szewczyk, Volkan Salma, Silvana Radu and David Evans.
Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Porto
A 36-hour course on the acquisition, processing and analysis of EEG signal, held at the Laboratory of Neuropsychophysiology. Topics included introductions to EEG and ERP, ERP research design, principles of EEG data collection, signal processing and data extraction, statistical analysis of ERP data, and reproducibility and open-science practices in EEG/ERP research — taught by Fernando Ferreira-Santos, Fernando Barbosa, Tiago O. Paiva and colleagues.
Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Organised by the Research Centre for Systems and Technologies (SYSTEC) in collaboration with the ARISE associated laboratory, providing experience with applications of cyber-physical systems in robotics, energy, mobility, production systems and health.
Covered topics: introduction to drones; deep and machine learning; optimisation; path-following control for autonomous vehicles; optimisation in industrial settings; designing robotic solutions with freeware tools; and electric mobility case studies.
Cambridge Assessment English
Credential ID B6703928. Scores: Reading 200 (grade A, C2); Use of English 201 (grade A, C2); Writing 190 (C1); Listening 193 (C1); Speaking 195 (C1).
Symposium on Electrical and Computer Engineering, DCE23 — Doctoral Congress in Engineering, University of Porto
DCE23, the Doctoral Congress in Engineering, was held on 15–16 June 2023 at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. This hands-on workshop gave participants the fundamental concepts of version control and the features Git offers for code — or any text, including a thesis.
Topics: rsync, diff and patch; an overview of revision-control systems with briefings on RCS and Subversion; configuring Git and setting up GPG for signed commits; hands-on practice with many Git commands; tags; branching and merging; storage areas; a brief look at Git internals; and version-control etiquette.
15th U.Porto Young Researchers Meeting (IJUP)
A presentation of FEP-2100 — its context and how we created it. Distinguished as the Best Oral Communication in the Engineering area of this edition.
INESC TEC
My internship on parametric human-body models was distinguished as the best of the MCT category by the jury of the Summer@CTM 2022 internship programme.
15th U.Porto Young Researchers Meeting (IJUP 2022)
“GNU social v3 and Unbound Actors” was distinguished as the best oral communication in the Engineering area.
Amazing understanding of general software-engineering principles and of web standards (such as semantic HTML, ARIA, ActivityPub), a great project coordinator and a great writer.
Proactively seeking to gain knowledge in many different areas, has a lot of attention to detail and goes to great lengths to read a lot of material in order to keep himself informed and be able to help others as well. This showed clearly during our time at college, both as a colleague during classes and also as a student representative, as well as in his work on extracurricular projects.
Diogo has an inquisitive mind, with broad interests in control, computation, digital culture, and entrepreneurship. His written work is excellent. He has a very organised mind and the technical foundations to address and solve complex problems. Diogo is bright, intelligent, a team worker, efficient, effective, very pleasant to work with, very serious about research and strongly committed to pursuing research in the interest of society.
