RESUME / FULL-TIME ENGINEERING
Rafael Cardoso
Staff Platform and Distributed Systems Engineer
Portland, ME | Open to Remote / Hybrid
Authorized to work in the U.S. | No sponsorship required
Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience in backend platforms and enterprise integrations, progressing to Senior Staff Engineer at Synchro. Led architecture and code reviews for teams of 3 to 8 engineers. Designed and supported a pipeline processing approximately 20 million fiscal transactions per week, with hands-on experience in Kubernetes delivery, observability, and production recovery.
Technical scope
- Backend
- Java, Spring Boot, Scala, Go, SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle Database
- Distributed Systems
- Kafka, Redpanda, idempotency, backpressure, retries, recovery
- Platform
- Kubernetes, Docker, Kustomize, Argo CD, GitOps, CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana
- Technical Leadership
- Architecture reviews, code reviews, release validation, production diagnosis
- Additional
- Rust, PL/SQL, Apache Camel
Professional experience
Senior Software Engineer / Independent Engineering / RCLabs
September 2024 - Present
- Built Go and Scala backend services with PostgreSQL and Redpanda, using durable processing and recovery to handle interrupted work.
- Established Kubernetes GitOps delivery with Kustomize, Argo CD, release and rollback gates, and OpenTelemetry observability.
- Designed controlled MCP interfaces and retrieval workflows with authorization boundaries, input validation, and audit evidence.
Senior Staff Software Engineer / Synchro
May 2022 - September 2024
- Led architecture and code reviews for teams of 3 to 8 engineers delivering fiscal and enterprise integrations.
- Turned recurring production failures into reusable validation checks and integration design rules across client projects.
- Standardized CI/CD scripts and expanded automated tests across several services to make release verification repeatable and simplify failure diagnosis.
Senior Software Engineer / Synchro
September 2018 - May 2022
- Designed and supported a Java/Spring Boot and Apache Camel integration processing approximately 20 million fiscal transactions per week between Oracle ERP Cloud, electronic invoicing, and tax systems.
- Processed 1-2 GB XML documents from Oracle ERP Cloud SOAP services using PL/SQL and XSLT, with fault recovery, replayable processing, and durable transaction handling.
- Integrated Oracle Retail Fiscal Management with Synchro products and resolved fiscal data discrepancies across client deployments.
- Produced validation evidence for engineering, client, and commercial teams to confirm data correctness and release readiness.
Software Analyst / Synchro
February 2011 - September 2018
- Translated Brazilian tax rules, electronic filing requirements, and banking integration needs into software specifications for enterprise implementations.
- Traced data discrepancies, validated product behavior, and produced reports covering correctness, performance, and regulatory requirements.
Historical employer-system workload, reported in my resume. This is not Octopus throughput, an independent-project benchmark, or a synthetic demo result. Employer code and operational measurements are not public.
Independent projects
Independent engineering / September 2024 onward
My independent platform work includes Octopus durable ingestion, Atheros Search retrieval and embedding workers, the Rust VPN / Proxy, and Schema Migrator. These projects are separate from Synchro employment. Project activity is not employer workload or evidence of client adoption.
Octopus Event Ingestion Coordinator
Scala 3, Cats Effect, FS2, Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL
- Built an event ingestion coordinator with PostgreSQL-backed deduplication and durable offset tracking for at-least-once Kafka/Redpanda processing.
- Added backpressure, bounded retries, and dead-letter handling to recover failed work and control processing load.
- Instrumented processing with OpenTelemetry and archived large payloads in MinIO with hash verification.
Atheros Search and Integration Console
Go, PostgreSQL, pgvector
- Built a Go service for hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval over operational records using PostgreSQL and pgvector.
- Implemented recoverable embedding jobs with configurable backends, retries, caching, and circuit breaking.
- Developed a console that explains search rankings and domain risk scores so users can inspect why results were returned.
Education
- M.S., Data Analysis - Universidade Nove de Julho, 2020
- B.S., Computer Science - Faculdades Metropolitanas Unidas, 2011