Fernando Luz’s Resume

Contact information

About me

Engineering Manager with 18+ years of experience leading platform transformations and scaling engineering organizations in high-complexity environments.

I operate at the intersection of architecture and execution: leading teams through system migrations (monolith to microservices), improving delivery predictability, and raising engineering quality standards at scale.

My focus is turning engineering effort into business impact: reducing latency, increasing delivery speed, and enabling teams to operate with greater ownership and autonomy.

Background across distributed systems, backend platforms, and high-performance computing allows me to navigate from deep technical decisions to organizational outcomes, consistently improving scalability, reliability, and execution confidence.

Experience

Engineering Lead — AUTODOC, Apr/2024 - Present

Leading the PDP (Product Detail Page) team through a transition from monolithic architecture to an event-driven microservices ecosystem, owning technical direction and execution for a high-traffic platform.

Driving architectural decisions, delivery practices, and operational standards to enable scalable system evolution, clearer ownership boundaries, and faster, more reliable deployments across several teams.

Selected outcomes:

Led the decomposition of PDP into microservices, enabling independent service ownership and contributing to systems handling (25k rps) while establishing a consistent and unified product data layer across domains.
Introduced event-driven data pipelines processing around 12M Kafka events/week, enabling downstream teams to consume product data asynchronously and reducing cross-service coupling.
Maintained stable latency (100ms) during architectural transition, preventing regressions in user experience while increasing system modularity and deployment independence.
Shifted quality ownership to engineering teams and established automated testing as a standard practice, increasing coverage from 25% to 70% and reducing reliance on manual QA across the development lifecycle.

Engineering Manager — Talkdesk, 2022 - 2024

Owned delivery and execution across a multi-product portfolio, aligning engineering efforts with customer value and operational reliability.

Led three teams (10+ engineers), evolving team structure, ownership models, and execution practices to improve autonomy, alignment, and delivery throughput.

Drove organizational improvements in quality, cross-team collaboration, and release readiness to enable more predictable and scalable delivery.

Selected outcomes:

Drove adoption of automated testing practices across teams, increasing coverage from 50% to 80% and reducing production defects, enabling more predictable releases.
Established an end-to-end testing strategy within platform constraints, standardizing release validation and improving stability across multiple product areas.
Supported adoption of Agent Flows by strategic customers (e.g., EDP), contributing to product validation and reinforcing the platform’s commercial viability.
Improved cross-team execution by redefining collaboration models between engineering, product, and QA, reducing delivery friction and enabling more efficient coordination across teams.

Senior Software Engineer — Talkdesk, 2021 - 2022

Owned end-to-end delivery of the first production-ready Financial Services platform, contributing to initial market entry and establishing the technical foundation for future expansion.

Selected outcomes:

Delivered the first version of Visual IVR for Financial Services, enabling initial customer adoption and validating the product direction.
Reduced projected rollout costs by 75% by replacing a third-party frontend with an in-house solution, increasing control over delivery and reducing long-term dependency.
Accelerated adoption of engineering practices by delivering internal sessions on Functional Programming and performance testing (K6), increasing team capability and technical alignment.

Senior Software Engineer — Capgemini Portugal [ASML Project], 2018 - 2021

Delivered critical software components for the next-generation ASML lithography platform in a high-reliability environment, balancing feature delivery with testability and long-term maintainability.

Led the Portugal team in expanding unit testing with a gtest-based framework, improved a robotics component through a robust Variant Pattern, and helped strengthen engineering culture by co-founding an internal Meetup group in Capgemini PT.

Selected outcomes:

Delivered the first version of the RYUN (Universal Pick and Place Robot) component with all planned features and 100% code coverage.
Accelerated the first phase of the UTTK / ATTEST migration by delivering 400 tests in 10 weeks against an initial estimate of 24 weeks.
Reduced migration risk in the RYAU component by auditing autotesters and identifying 65% fake tests (tests without implementation).

IT Manager — Technomar Engineering, 2016 - 2018

Led a team of 6 Individual Contributors responsible for simulator delivery and operational stability for the Technomar Maritime Simulator, balancing product commitments with reliability and execution discipline.

Raised engineering maturity by introducing Scrum, Test-Driven Development, and Git, and by coaching the team toward stronger execution and code quality.

Also initiated the certification plan with DNV GL agency and contributed technically to the core hydrodynamic numerical model where that involvement improved simulator fidelity and performance.

Selected outcomes:

Improved simulator communication performance by 15% while also increasing maintainability through changes to the phonon-based communication channel.
Delivered a new simulation station end to end, enabling a simulator with 360-degree immersion.
Increased delivery transparency and work management discipline by instituting GitLab for metrics, bugs, features, backlog, and milestones.

Researcher / HPC Software Engineer — Numerical Offshore Tank, 2008 - 2016

Developed and optimized High-Performance Computing applications in the TPN laboratory using C++/C, Python, MPI/sockets, and bash on Linux and Windows.

Combined research, performance engineering, testing practices, and system integration to improve scalability and reliability, and contributed to the creation of SMH, a finalist for the 2016 ANP Prize Award for Technological Innovation.

Selected outcomes:

Reduced cluster resource usage by 35% by optimizing parallel execution of the numerical solver based on my Ph.D. research.
Reduced execution time by 10% with OpenMP improvements and implementation of MPI standards in the parallel version.
Improved repository integrity by championing a testing flow and building an initial CI setup with CDash and CTest.

Graduate Full Professor — Paulista University, 2011 - 2016

Graduate-level teaching and course execution across software engineering and computing topics, combining lectures, labs, assessments, and student mentoring.

Supported hands-on learning through technical projects and clear evaluation criteria, helping students build practical understanding of software development.

Education

Ph.D. in Computing Engineering, 2015

University: University of São Paulo (USP) Institute: Polytechnic School Theme: Methodology for the execution of parallel applications based on BSP model with heterogeneous tasks

M.Sc. in Applied Physics, 2010

University: University of São Paulo (USP) Institute: Physics Institute of São Carlos Theme: Implementation of the MILC package in the study of full QCD

B.Sc. in Physics, 2006

University: University of São Paulo (USP) Institute: Physics Institute of São Carlos

Certifications

Professional Scrum Master — Scrum.org, 2022

Load: 20h Certificate: Professional Scrum Master

Responsive Web Design — Free Code Camp, 2020

Load: 300h Certificate: Responsive Web Design

JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures — Free Code Camp, 2020

Load: 300h Certificate: JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures

Scientific Computing with Python — Free Code Camp, 2020

Load: 400h Certificate: Scientific Computing with Python

Languages

Portuguese: Native
English: Fluent

Skills

Agility
Go
Jira
PostgreSQL
Kotlin
SpringBoot
C++
Bash
Python
Object-oriented design
C
JavaScript
SML
HTML
CSS
Matlab
Design Patterns
Functional Paradigm