About
Product builder, software engineer and AI systems architect.
I build software products at the intersection of product design, engineering and artificial intelligence.
My background did not start in software. It started in design, branding and visual communication, moved through entrepreneurship and product development, and eventually became software engineering.
Today, those disciplines have converged into the way I approach products: understanding the problem, designing the experience, engineering the system and increasingly using AI as part of the product itself.
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What I'm working on now
My work today is heavily focused on understanding what software becomes when AI is treated as infrastructure rather than an additional feature.
At Uphold, where I work as a lead software developer, I am currently helping rethink parts of the software development lifecycle around agentic AI - exploring how agents can participate meaningfully in the way software is planned, built, understood and maintained.
I am also the founder of S² AI Agency, a software, product and AI development company. Alongside client work, I own and direct several product initiatives being developed by the S² team. My role spans product direction, architecture, technical decisions and hands-on development, while the engineering and design work is shared across the agency.
- 01
Enterprise AI platform
An operating environment for companies to deploy AI agents, internal applications, organisational knowledge and integrations.
- 02
AI-powered coaching platform
A professional coaching application that uses session context, structured frameworks, observations and AI to help coaches understand and manage long-running coaching processes.
- 03
AI-powered network for ideas and projects
A platform connecting ideas, projects and the people interested in supporting or developing them, with AI helping structure, understand and surface opportunities.
- 04
Enterprise regulatory documentation platform
A documentation environment for highly regulated organisations, combining familiar document workflows with AI-assisted knowledge, generation and document intelligence.
These are ongoing product initiatives rather than finished achievements. They give me the opportunity to remain deeply involved in product and engineering work across very different problem spaces while leading a team capable of taking those products from concept into production.
Building software
Before the current generation of AI products, I spent years building software. I have worked across frontend architecture, backend systems, internal tooling, product interfaces, developer experience and full-stack applications.
At Uphold, I have participated in the development of a significant portion of the company’s internal tooling as well as product and engineering initiatives used by teams across the organisation. Over the years I have also built numerous websites, applications, internal platforms, prototypes and client products.
My primary environment has been the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, particularly React, Next.js and Node.js, combined with modern cloud infrastructure, databases and APIs.
But technology has rarely been the starting point.
What needs to exist?
Then I work backwards toward the product, interaction model, architecture and technology required to make it happen.
Generative AI
Around 2023 I kept seeing the same gap in the companies I worked with: work that could be automated, and nobody with the time or the context to do it. I started taking that on as consulting, alongside my development roles, connecting systems with Zapier, Make and n8n and removing repetitive operational work.
It was not a change of direction. Consulting was already part of what I did, and automation was an extension of it, closer to how a business actually runs day to day.
Large language models widened what that work could be. Automation stopped being only about moving information between systems. Software could now interpret information, reason about it, generate new information and interact with people.
That pulled my work toward AI-native applications, agents, retrieval systems, knowledge architectures, LLM orchestration and increasingly autonomous software systems. It eventually led me to create S² AI Agency.
Before software
My professional life originally started in design. I worked with graphic design, branding, communication and visual production, eventually creating my own agency in Portugal in 2006.
That experience gave me something that has remained central throughout my career: I tend to see software as a product before I see it as code.
The financial crisis eventually brought that business to an end, and I rebuilt my career around software development. Around 2013, I began moving deeply into web development - HTML, CSS and JavaScript initially, followed by React, Node.js and increasingly complex application architectures.
I later worked in product companies including Scytale and Uphold, moving progressively deeper into software architecture, product engineering and engineering leadership.
What I bring together
Today, my expertise sits across several disciplines rather than inside a single job title.
- 01
Product engineering
Taking an idea from ambiguity to a working product, including product decisions, architecture and implementation.
- 02
Software engineering
Designing and building production applications across frontend, backend, data and infrastructure.
- 03
AI engineering
LLM applications, agents, RAG and knowledge systems, tool use, orchestration and AI-native product architectures.
- 04
Developer experience
Improving the systems, tooling and processes engineers use to build software.
- 05
Product and interface design
Understanding how complex systems should expose themselves to humans without making the underlying complexity their problem.
- 06
Automation
Connecting systems and designing workflows that remove repetitive operational work.
- 07
Technical leadership
Providing technical direction while remaining close enough to the implementation to build, review and solve difficult engineering problems directly.
- 08
Entrepreneurship
Building companies and products, working directly with clients and making decisions across technology, product and business.
The common thread
The technologies have changed several times during my career.
- Design→
- Software→
- AI
The common thread has remained remarkably consistent:
I’ve always loved taking complicated problems and turning them into things people can actually use.