Tech Lead · 15+ years of Ruby on Rails · AI agent orchestration
Estevão de Abreu Machado
I modernise legacy Rails systems by orchestrating fleets of AI coding agents. Recently, that meant taking a large, long-lived monolith through several major Rails and Ruby upgrades in six weeks.
Brisbane, Australia · estevaom@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/estevaom · github.com/estevaom · www.estevaom.com
Brisbane · available for consulting
- 6 weeks
- to complete a major Rails and Ruby modernisation
- Large-scale
- legacy monolith upgraded across several major releases
- Minutes → seconds
- load time of a key customer dashboard
- 0 → 25%+
- test coverage introduced on a codebase that had none
Selected work
Education technology company · 2026
A long-lived monolith, modernised in six weeks
Problem
A large Rails platform had fallen several major framework and language versions behind, making ongoing development harder and riskier.
Approach
I led the work with one other engineer and a fleet of parallel AI coding agents. We split the migration into small, backwards-compatible changes, merged continuously, and used CI to validate each step.
Result
Completed the upgrade through several major Rails and Ruby releases in six weeks, then rolled the modernised stack out across production.
Early-stage fintech · 2025–2026
A slow customer dashboard, reduced from minutes to seconds
Problem
A key customer dashboard took minutes to load and sometimes failed, on a codebase with little automated coverage.
Approach
I profiled the application, rewrote slow queries, moved heavy panels to asynchronous loading, right-sized the infrastructure, and introduced system tests.
Result
Brought load times down to a few seconds, established meaningful automated test coverage, and improved the reliability of core financial workflows.
Experience
2026 – now
Tech Lead at Education technology company
Remote from Brisbane
Led a major Rails and Ruby modernisation across a large, long-lived platform. Now bringing the surrounding applications up to date and introducing modern frontend and component patterns.
2025 – 2026
Founding Engineer at Early-stage fintech
Fintech startup · remote
Improved application performance and reliability, established automated test coverage, and helped develop core fintech workflows. Led a UI redesign through an AI-assisted delivery process.
2023 – 2025
Engineering Lead at Education technology company
Remote from Brisbane
Led a squad responsible for a large, long-running Rails platform. Helped drive the organisation's AI adoption through talks, workshops, and an agent-assisted upgrade workflow.
2017 – 2023
Senior Software Engineer at Reinteractive
Rails consultancy · remote
Kept 20+ enterprise client apps healthy under the Code Care program, raised their test coverage to 90%+, and consulted for clients including PwC and nib. Ran technical interviews as the team grew.
2015 – 2017
Senior Software Engineer at DashBid
Ad tech, New York · remote
Built customer dashboards and documented REST APIs, and fed the production database from Redshift and Treasure Data. Ran the team's scrums and retrospectives.
2012 – 2015
Software Engineer at XL Solutions
Rio de Janeiro
Built e-commerce for Brazil's largest phone carriers, a real-time auction platform, and marketplaces with millions of items on Elasticsearch. Ported legacy apps from Rails 2.3 to Rails 4.
2007 – 2012
Software Engineer at Hands
Rio de Janeiro
Released Brazil's first mobile portal the same day the first iPhone launched, and led the codebase's migration from C# to Ruby on Rails. On the side, founded Kissy, a dating app that launched before Tinder.
Education B.A. Computer Science & Project Management, Universidade Gama Filho, Rio de Janeiro, 2009
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