DevOps Engineer · Coimbra, Portugal
From public safety to cloud reliability. I design, automate and keep infrastructure running on AWS.
I spent eight years as a police officer with PSP, Portugal's national police. After the police academy I worked five years on patrol in Lisbon, then two years in the Weapons and Explosives Department, investigating weapons and explosives cases across the whole country, islands included. That is where I learned to stay calm when things go wrong, to follow procedure when it matters, and to see an incident through to the end.
In 2023 I changed careers through the University of Coimbra's intensive Acertar o Rumo programme (final grade 19.1/20) and joined Present Technologies as its first DevOps engineer. I started the company's DevOps practice, moved its core services to AWS without downtime, cut its AWS bill by about 30% and now mentor a junior engineer. Outside work I train for long-distance triathlon.
2011
Lifeguard
2015
Police officer (PSP)
2023
Acertar o Rumo (University of Coimbra)
2024
DevOps Engineer
First DevOps engineer at the company: started the practice and leads it
I cut the company's AWS spend by about 30% and caught a logging fault that had pushed a development account from about $500 to $7,000 a month. Day to day, that means cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure and Scaleway, as code with Pulumi and Terraform.
I started the practice from scratch and now lead it, with a junior engineer I mentor, and I keep every team's CI/CD running. I fixed the logging fault and added budgets and alerts so it cannot happen silently again. When production breaks, I am on the incident, including restoring a mission-critical client system under pressure.
Building a second data centre that can take over a mission-critical client platform, with near-zero recovery time and data loss. The secondary site mirrors production with database replication, and failover is scripted behind a manual approval step.
Moving the company's on-premises services to AWS with no downtime, from the lowest-impact systems to the most critical. GitLab, Jenkins, Harbor and Artifactory now run on EC2 behind load balancers, on a multi-account network with a Transit Gateway shared through AWS RAM and a site-to-site VPN to the office, all defined as code.
Running the company's internal platforms, including the move from Slack to a self-hosted Zulip, and maintaining almost every CI/CD pipeline. Builds run on spot instances to keep costs low, and when a team is blocked, I am usually the one they call.
Eight years of police work, from patrol in Lisbon to weapons and explosives investigation nationwide: incident response under pressure, strict procedure and clear written reports.
I investigated weapons and explosives cases across the country, including the Azores and Madeira, and ran the national weapons destruction processes. I also supported film and TV productions shot in Portugal, such as Fast X and Rabo de Peixe, bringing replica weapons to set and teaching actors to handle them safely.
Three summer seasons as a lifeguard, first on a river beach and then on the beaches of Figueira da Foz, where I was responsible for Praia+, a project that makes the beach accessible to people with reduced mobility.
A bilingual CV site whose infrastructure and pipeline are part of the portfolio. It is a static Astro site on AWS, provisioned with Pulumi and Terraform and deployed from GitHub Actions without stored credentials.
Moving a company's on-premises services to AWS with no downtime, on a multi-account network built as code with Pulumi and Terraform.
A second data centre that can take over a mission-critical client platform, with database replication and an approval-gated failover, aiming for near-zero recovery time and data loss.
Acertar o Rumo, intensive IT programme
University of Coimbra · Sep 2023 – Sep 2025
Final grade: 19.1 / 20
Informatics Engineering (BSc), evening programme
Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra (ISEC) · Nov 2011 – present
Public Security Police Officer Course
Escola Prática de Polícia · Sep 2015 – Sep 2016
Lifeguard Course
Instituto de Socorros a Náufragos · Apr 2008 – May 2008
Portuguese · Native
English
Spanish
Italian
Long-distance triathlon is where I train the things reliability work also needs, such as months of preparation for a single day, pacing so the last hour is as solid as the first, and staying calm when the plan meets reality.
45.4 km
swimming in 2026
≈ 908 Olympic pool lengths≈ 1.3× the English Channel≈ 3.2× the Strait of Gibraltar≈ 252 thousand bananas, end to end
3,243 km
cycling in 2026
≈ 115% of the way from Coimbra to eu-north-1, this site's AWS region≈ 5.8× Portugal from north to south≈ 1.0 of a Tour de France≈ 18.0 million bananas, end to end
325 km
running in 2026
≈ 7.7 marathons≈ 3,095 football pitches≈ 37 Everests, if it went straight up≈ 1.8 million bananas, end to end
Triathlon · 2026
Finisher
Xtreme Triathlon Estrela
8:30:44
Duathlon
Regional champion, age group 30–34
Cross duathlon (Interior e Litoral Centro)
2025 and 2026
Running · 2024
Finisher
Seville Marathon
3:08
Training data from Intervals.icu · updated 7 Nov 2026
Have a role or a project in mind? Send me a message.
