Rui Baltazar
Singapore, SG
hi@rpbaltazar.com

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.

Experience


Engineering Lead
January 2023
 — 
Present
Wise

Engineering Lead for South Asia team, lately with higher focus on the India market. My responsibilities are split between technical leadership, engineering mentorship and product development. I work closely with the different internal and external stakeholders to deliver the Wise mission in India market, focusing on regulatory compliance and product offering.

    Staff Engineer
    July 2022
     — 
    December 2022
    Zeus Living, Inc

    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

    • 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
    Director of Engineering
    August 2019
     — 
    July 2022
    Perx - Lifestyle Marketing Platform

    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.

    • 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
    CTO / Co-founder
    October 2016
     — 
    January 2019
    FirstTouch

    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

    • 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
    Lead Software Engineer
    April 2014
     — 
    June 2019
    OpsManager

    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

    • 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
    Freelance Full-Stack Developer
    September 2015
     — 
    February 2016
    Intelllex

    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.

    • Full-stack developer
    • Described and implemented development workflow for newcomers
    • Sysadmin work setting up and documenting the production environment deploy
    Senior Software Engineer
    November 2011
     — 
    April 2014
    SMART (MIT alliance)

    Full stack developer, as well as technology advisor for research support.

    • 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
    Software Engineer
    September 2009
     — 
    November 2011
    Ubiwhere, Lda

    Software developer both for the main company and as outsourced resource.

    • 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

    Projects


    ros-apartment
    Present
     — 
    Present

    Drop-in replacement of apartment gem, developed for providing multi-tenancy solutions for Ruby on Rails projects

    story_branch
    Present
     — 
    Present

    Quickly create a feature branch based on the active stories in your PivotalTracker project, Github issues, JIRA tickets and Linear

    Education


    University of Coimbra
    September 2005
     — 
    September 2010
    Master in Computer Science
    • Artificial Intelligence for Ubiquitous Computing
    • OOP
    • Network Systems
    • AI Introduction
    • Operating Systems
    • Distributed Systems
    Politechnika Bialostocka
    September 2008
     — 
    June 2009
    Master's exchange program in Computer Science
    • Cryptography
    • Robotics
    • Methods of Modelling

    Publications


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

    Awards


    IDA's Best Government Data Mash-Up
    September 2013
    IDA Singapore

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

    Languages


    Portuguese:
    Native speaker
    English:
    Full professional
    Italian:
    Professional working
    Spanish:
    Elementary
    French:
    Elementary

    Interests


    Scuba Diving:
    Divemaster
    Sports:
    Football, Handball, Tennis