Lucas Pinto
Staff Software Engineer & Engineering Lead
15 years turning hard problems into systems that hold up in production.
# Highlights
- Won an Engineering Emmy for Evercast, a platform I helped build for over 4 years
- Right now I lead the data and AI platform for a Fortune 100 media company, with a team that scales from 8 to 14 engineers as demand shifts. The kind where a bad deploy makes the news and turns the stock price red.
- 15 years in, from scrappy startup builds to Fortune 100 production systems
- Fully remote for over a decade, back when it still meant a VPN and an apology
# Working together
I'm happily employed and not looking for a job. But I keep some room for advisory and fractional work when the problem's interesting enough to earn the hours. Usually data and AI platforms, plus live video if it's the kind of thing people say can't be done. And if you're sitting on a genuinely rare full time role, I won't pretend I'd ignore it. Either way, get in touch. Worst case, I point you at someone else that is great and trustworthy.
Based in São Paulo, working US hours.
# My thoughts...
## On People & Software
- Half my job is engineering. The other half is translation, turning system diagrams into business cases.
- Software is built by people. I've seen brilliant code fail because the team couldn't talk to each other.
- I once built a "perfect" system that nobody used. Turns out I'd solved the wrong problem.
## On AI & the Future
- AI changes what "senior" means. The rote parts got cheap. Deciding what's worth building didn't.
- I've gone from prompting AI to orchestrating agents. The skill now is designing systems where AI components supervise each other.
- The dev lifecycle barely changed in decades. AI is finally rewriting all of it, not only the code.
## On Architecture & Scale
- The systems I'm proudest of are simple enough that I could explain them to my kid someday.
- I've watched teams spend months optimizing for scale they never hit. Build for the traffic you have, not the traffic you fantasize about.
- The best architecture isn't the cleverest one. It's the one your team can debug at 3am.