Hi, I'm Marcelo! 👋
Staff Software Engineer with 7+ years building enterprise-scale ecommerce and AI-native platforms. At VTEX, architected the AI Workspace and internal AI tooling used across 20+ engineering teams, led the ground-up rewrite of VTEX Admin (the platform's core micro-frontend framework, serving 2.6k+ merchants) to 99.99% availability, and built developer platforms cutting app time-to-market 10x. Comfortable end-to-end — backend, infrastructure, and front-end — with a long-running side practice running infrastructure and observability stacks for personal projects.
When I'm not writing code or managing my own infrastructure, you'll find me immersing myself in sports or spending quality time with friends.
Experience
VTEX | Jan 2021 – Present
Staff Software Engineer
- Architected VTEX's AI Workspace (the AI-native experience for B2C merchants) — built the Building Blocks framework letting engineering teams ship AI agents autonomously, plus the SDK and templates that streamlined AI app development company-wide. In early access with customers.
- Defined Spec-Driven Development (SDD) and drove its adoption across VTEX's SDLC, changing how ~60% of engineering teams build with AI-assisted workflows.
- Led the ground-up rewrite of VTEX Admin — the platform's core micro-frontend framework and primary merchant-facing surface — raising availability to 99.99% and eliminating vendor lock-in technical debt; this became the foundation for all later AI work.
- Built the VTEX Admin Apps SDK, an internal developer platform adopted by 50+ engineering teams, cutting Admin App time-to-market 10x. Also built the Shoreline Design System (hundreds of developers) and an AI assistant that rewrites legacy Admin Apps or generates new ones from a prompt; a related instrumentation initiative cut runtime errors ~70% across legacy apps.
- Shipped a Global Search feature saving customers 360 hours/month, a CLI that migrated 100k+ accounts to the new Admin and now runs rollout/rollback for all engineering teams, and an observability ingestion service for front-end telemetry.
- Screened dozens of candidates for backend and AI engineering roles.
Other Initiatives I Contributed To
soy.chat | Apr 2025 – Present
Founder
- SaaS platform letting anyone spin up a website with a personalized, branded AI chatbot over their own knowledge base. Privacy-first: EU-hosted, bank-grade encryption, no data resale. Still in early access — I'm the primary user today, dogfooding it before opening it up more broadly.
- Grew out of celo.chat, my own AI-powered interactive CV, platformized after seeing demand beyond my own use case.
Eu tive um sonho | Aug 2022 – Present
Founder
- Social platform for sharing dreams — I run the infrastructure and offer it as a SaaS for others to use (300+ registered users, 1,000+ dreams recorded, entirely organic growth). Also a personal R&D vehicle for AI/NLP experimentation running open-source 3B–8B LLMs via Ollama/LiteLLM, fully instrumented with OpenTelemetry.
Cubos | May 2019 – Jan 2021
Software Engineer
- At Cubos, I had the chance to work and contribute to a variety of projects on the ecommerce, fintech and edtech industries, using frameworks and technologies such as React, Node.js and Django, among others.
- While at Cubos, I developed the ecommerce of the largest dancing platform from Brazil, FitDance, and enabled them to efficiently manage their ecommerce operations for their (at the time) +200k customers.
- I was also responsible for developing a series of backend services and frontend platforms for the largest "Crédito Consignado" (Payroll Deduction Loan) platform of Brazil's public sector workforce on the Northeast Region, Credcesta, enabling the company to manage and process thousands of loans per month for their (at the time) 40k customers.
Education
Federal University of Bahia | Jan 2014 – Jun 2021
B.A. in Human Sciences
- My education at the Federal University of Bahia was multidisciplinary, with a strong emphasis on Philosophy, Sociology, and Psychology. This foundation allowed me to explore diverse experiences.
- Research: I played a key role in a research project investigating the health impacts of violence among different populations (infants, young adults, women, elderlies, etc.). This project resulted in the development and implementation of educational materials aimed at high schoolers.
- Leadership: I volunteered for AIESEC, where I managed and sold international exchange programs for students and professionals.
- Engineering: As part of the Formula SAE Team, I contributed to the development of the vehicle's telemetry system.
- Teaching: I served as a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Sociology course, where I had the opportunity to guide students on their sociological journey through instruction and support.
Skills
Hard Skills
Programming Languages
JavascriptTypescriptPythonGolang
Frontend Frameworks
ReactNext.jsGatsbyAstro
Backend Frameworks
Node.jsDjangoFastAPIExpress.jsFlaskDeno
Cloud & Infrastructure
DockerKubernetesAWS (EKS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3, Amplify, Bedrock, CodeArtifact, Redshift, QuickSight, Route53)HetznerBunnyNetVercelPulumiTerraformOn-Premise
Databases & Storage
RedisPostgreSQLSQLiteClickHouseMongoDBElasticsearchMinIO
AI/ML Tools
LangChainMastraAI SDKLiteLLM
Observability & Monitoring
OpenTelemetryLangfuseSigNozPrometheusGrafanaOpenSearch
Testing
CypressJestPlaywrightAutomated Testing
DevOps & CI/CD
TektonArgoCDGitLab CI/CDDroneGitHub ActionsJenkinsCircleCI
Architecture & Design
Platform EngineeringAI EngineeringDistributed SystemsMicro-servicesMicro-frontends
Soft Skills
Languages
English (Fluent)Portuguese (Native)Spanish (Fluent)French (Conversational)Catalan (Learning)
Leadership & Mentoring
System Design InterviewsMentoring Junior EngineersCross-Cultural Communication (Erin Meyer's Framework)
Outside of work, I run and operate infrastructure and observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, SigNoz) for my own projects — this website included.