Senior platform engineer
João Cerqueira
Technologist by trade and at heart.
My work has grown from building applications to leading teams and designing cloud platforms, learning new technologies and developing new skills as the problems demand.
Today, I build internal developer platforms on AWS and Kubernetes that give engineering teams consistent ways to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and operate them in production. I’m extending that experience into AI engineering, bringing AI applications and agent-based workflows into production.
Work Experience
Philip Morris International
Platform Engineer
- Designed the architecture and led the migration of the data plane to Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, supporting hundreds of workloads with automatic node provisioning and scaling. Established per-customer isolation for dozens of customers, with separate permissions, access controls, and security boundaries.
- Designed and built a task-aware Kubernetes controller in Go to reduce the risk of interrupting active data-processing tasks during node management and auto-scaling.
- Adapted infrastructure repositories for AI agents to support onboarding, troubleshooting, and feature development, with security guardrails.
- Managed application and database infrastructure as code with Terraform, automating resource scheduling and cost controls.
- Enabled teams to provision platform resources through self-service GitOps workflows, with automated delivery across environments.
- Built automated workflows for security audits and credential rotation.
- Introduced JVM monitoring for application memory, garbage collection, threads, and CPU, enabling customers to optimize data pipeline performance.
- Established platform-wide disaster-recovery plans and testing, with runbooks for recovery and infrastructure maintenance.
Carlsberg Group
Platform Engineer
- Led GitHub adoption and standardized repository configuration and security policies as code across more than 900 repositories.
- Built Terraform modules and pipelines that enabled product teams to provision infrastructure themselves in line with security guidelines and internal engineering best practices.
- Built CI/CD pipelines and self-hosted GitHub runners on AWS.
- Helped teams introduce security and code-quality checks into development workflows, including SAST and secret scanning. Improved the overall security posture by identifying hundreds of access tokens and other secrets in Git repositories and helping identify applications and internal libraries vulnerable to Log4Shell, alongside other potential code vulnerabilities.
Carlsberg Group · Technical Lead
Helped bring an e-learning platform and mobile app in-house from an external vendor. Re-architected the platform and led the eight-person team responsible for its development and maintenance.
Carlsberg Group · Frontend Developer
Developed an application for sales teams serving European markets, with customer management, visit and survey scheduling, and map-based customer views.
Quantum Leap
Lead Software Developer
- Built proof-of-concept platforms for banking, manufacturing, and retail, integrating external data sources and proprietary IoT devices with web applications using Elixir, PostgreSQL, React, Vue.js, and MQTT.
- Developed a multi-brand clothing marketplace using Elixir, MongoDB, and React.
- Developed an internal video-conferencing tool using Elixir, MongoDB, React, WebRTC, and Twilio.
Show earlier experience
EMVIAGEM
Software Developer
- Administered the group’s Windows and Linux servers and built a service to integrate and automate invoicing with suppliers and corporate customers.
- Built company websites with WordPress and an internal tool with Node.js and React to standardize flyer creation across the group.
Polygon (PT)
Web Developer
- Built WordPress websites and PHP/MySQL systems, including a CMS for a marine services company and a CRM/recruitment platform.
- Led frontend development and Angular adoption, trained the team, and introduced Git and Vagrant for version control and reproducible development environments.