Open to opportunities

Michael Antunes

@michaelantunes

Message

I build production generative AI, data pipelines, and backend platforms in Python.

South Africa

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm looking to build production generative AI, reproducible data pipelines, and backend platforms, ideally with end-to-end ownership from technical discovery and prototypes through secure deployment and team leadership.

I'm building secure on-premise LLM platforms and production data systems at Saab Grintek Defence, including RAG, MCP agents, knowledge graphs, pgvector retrieval, and LLM evaluation guardrails for air-gapped defense environments.

I delivered $50M+ in asset visibility across 60K+ parts and reduced reporting time from one week to one minute by architecting Python obsolescence-management microservices. I also replaced manual stock and production checks with scheduled, tested Dagster, dbt, and DuckDB transformations.

Previously at MPI Holdings, I led a small engineering team building fault-tolerant Python and FastAPI services for live fleet data from 1,300+ mining vehicles. I designed Azure-native ETL pipelines, automated deployments with Spinnaker, and led an Azure-based Power BI project from discovery through delivery.

I'm a greenfield builder who turns prototypes into production systems, with experience spanning Rust performance engineering, React administration tools, reproducible pipelines, and full lifecycle technical leadership.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Industrial and Automations Engineer

Current

Saab Grintek Defence

Apr 2025 - Present (1 year 4 months)

Deployed secure on-premise LLM environments with RAG and MCP agents, built Dagster-orchestrated data pipelines, and developed evaluation pipelines with LLM-as-a-judge. Architected Python microservices for obsolescence management, delivering $50M+ in asset visibility and cutting reporting time from 1 week to 1 minute.

Python LLM RAG MCP LlamaIndex DSPy Hugging Face Pgvector Knowledge Graphs Dagster DBT DuckDB fastAPI Docker Kubernetes Terraform Jenkins CI CD RBAC

Lead Software Engineer

MPI Holdings

Dec 2023 - Apr 2025 (1 year 4 months)

Led a team developing fault-tolerant REST APIs for fleet data processing across 1300+ mining vehicles. Designed Azure-native ETL pipelines and implemented Spinnaker CI/CD for automated deployments, while leading Power BI dashboard projects.

Python fastAPI REST APIs Azure Functions Azure SQL ETL Spinnaker CI CD Power BI POC

Software Research Engineer

Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience

Aug 2023 - Dec 2023 (4 months)

Engineered high-performance Rust code with AVX2 vectorization and multithreading, achieving a 14x speed increase in genotyping normalization on large genomic datasets.

Rust Multithreading