Open to opportunities

Rafael Hurpia da Rocha

@rafaelhurpiadarocha

Backend Engineer and Tech Lead building production APIs, performance-focused PostgreSQL systems, and pragmatic architectures.

Netherlands

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a Backend Engineering role where I can own API design and database performance, contribute to pragmatic architecture, and lead teams through code review and mentoring—while building reliable CI/CD and secure deployments.

I’m a Backend engineer and Tech Lead with 9+ years building production systems in Python, focused on API design, PostgreSQL performance, and pragmatic architecture. I lead with clarity—turning technical decisions into maintainable, reliable services.

In my current role at The Silver Logic, I’ve led a team of 4–8 engineers through architecture ownership, code review, and mentoring. I also founded a company-wide Community of Practice (starting as Frontend, expanding to Backend) that shaped strategic technical decisions and helped me take on the company-wide DevOps Lead role.

I’m especially proud of performance wins—reducing a page load from ~1 minute (crashes) to ~4 seconds by combining Postgres query analysis with DRF serializer changes to stop over-fetching, aligning the API contract with frontend needs. I bring the same disciplined engineering to deployments, CI/CD security scanning, and developer workflow automation.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Volunteer Mentor

Current

Hack Your Future

Jun 2024 - Present (2 years)

Mentored and taught web development fundamentals to refugees and newcomers in the Netherlands.

Web Fundamentals Mentoring Teaching Coaching Curriculum Support

Current

DevOps Lead & Full-Stack

Current

The Silver Logic

Jun 2018 - Present (8 years)

Led architecture, code review, and mentoring for a 4–8 engineer team and founded a company-wide Community of Practice to drive strategic technical decisions. Improved API/database performance by reducing a slow page load from ~1 minute to ~4 seconds and built deployment pipelines with Jenkins, Terraform, and Docker while integrating automated security scanning into CI/CD.

Python Django AWS Terraform Jenkins Docker Security Scanning (CI CD)

Software Engineer

Scopus

Feb 2016 - Jan 2018 (1 year 11 months)

Built Node.js/Express and Python microservices, including a GraphQL backend-for-frontend serving an Android client, and managed Redis and MongoDB data stores. Owned containerization and CI/CD using Docker Compose/Swarm and GitLab CI, deploying services to AWS on Linux.

Node Express Python GraphQL Microservices Redis MongoDB Docker Gitlab CI AWS

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Polytechnic School, University of São Paulo

Electronic & Computer Engineering

Grade: Honours graduate (Top 5)

Honours graduate (Top 5) in Electronic & Computer Engineering at the Polytechnic School, University of São Paulo. Dissertation on indoor location and automation of drones using C++, ARToolKit, and GStreamer.