Rafael Correia
Engineer · Explorer · Perpetual Beginner
Founding engineer at Sonant,
a US-based insurtech startup
place, National Informatics
Olympiad — Portugal
Caminos de Santiago
walked since 2018
Pilgrims hosted at
World Youth Day 2023
Instruments
played
I build software. I walk thousands of kilometres. I've represented Portugal on the world stage. And yes — I once flew to California just to dance.
See my work
At the Desk.
Software built. Systems scaled. Startups joined.
Started with Pascal when I was 13 years old. Dabbled in about ten other languages since.
# the one that stayed
import everything_i_need
def solve(problem):
return problem.think_about_it()
# still shippingPython showed up at university for data processing scripts and never really left. It's the language I reach for without thinking — for a quick analysis, a data pipeline, an API, a one-off tool. I've written enough of it at this point that the syntax has stopped being something I read and started being something I think in.
// 2 AM. IOI training. Cold coffee.
#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
for (int i = 0; i < INF; i++)
if (eureka(i)) return 0;
}This is where I stopped messing around. Competitive programming, the Informatics Olympiad, years of training — late nights working through problems that had no hints and no tutorials, just a time limit and a judge. Finished top 2 in Portugal, represented the country internationally. C++ still runs in my head when I'm thinking about performance.
// Step 1: import everything
import java.lang.everything.*;
public class GetToThePoint {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("There has to be a better way.");
} // spoiler: there is
}University required Java. Then enterprise did too. Boilerplate, design patterns, XML config files that took longer to write than the logic they configured. I never warmed to it, but I learned to read architecture in it — and to spot when a codebase was about to become unmaintainable. That's worth something.
Somewhere between Pascal at thirteen
and whatever gets generated today,
the language stopped mattering.
Picking up a new one takes weeks.
What actually takes years is learning to build something that holds —
under load, under change, under people who weren't part of the original plan.
Got my feet wet with GCP. Then moved to AWS from the ground up.
Serverless, event-driven, production-shaped.
Google Cloud Platform and AWS. Data pipelines, API integrations, and enterprise automation for client projects across both clouds.
Founding engineer. Designed the AWS infrastructure from scratch — Lambda for serverless compute, EventBridge for async processing, S3 for blobs and media, relational and document databases, CloudWatch for logs and alerting.
Freelance work, personal tools, hardware experiments, and the occasional favour that turned into a real project.
Built the web presence for the parish where I grew up. The brief was simple: easy to update, works on any phone, doesn't look like it was built in 2005. The hardest part wasn't the code — it was writing content that didn't sound like a press release.
Real estate agents in Portugal were jumping between five different listing portals to match a client's criteria. Imo Assist aggregated them into one search. Chrome extension in JS, Python backend, Selenium to scrape the portals that didn't have APIs. Ran it as a freelance product for a couple of years.
Airbnb hosts in Portugal are required to issue a receipt through the AT (Autoridade Tributária) portal for every reservation. Doing it manually means logging in, filling forms, downloading PDFs — for every booking. TOCFlow reads the reservation, logs into AT, issues the receipt, and stores it. Nobody wants to do fiscal paperwork twice.
With software, a bug just breaks the program. With hardware, the LED doesn't light up and you have no idea if it's the code, the wiring, or the component. I built sensors, automation stuff, a few interactive installations. When a physical thing finally responds to something you wrote, it hits differently than a passing test suite.
AWS DeepRacer is a reinforcement learning competition: you train a model to drive a miniature car around a track. Accenture ran one internally. I was tuning reward functions mostly blind, so I built a tool around it — a Jupyter-based analyzer that overlays car metrics, action space heatmaps, and reward component plots directly onto the simulation video. Finished third.
Ran sessions at IST, FCT-NOVA, and SINFO30. Topics ranged from bioinformatics to metaverse demos.
Delivered a two-day Java programming workshop at IST. First session was theory — language fundamentals. Second was practical: building a small program with graphs.
Delivered a workshop at the 5th edition of the Semana da Bioengenharia at IST. Covered ECG signals — what they are, how to acquire them with Bitalino, and how to process them in Matlab to extract relevant features.
Delivered an image processing workshop at the 2nd edition of BiomedEnsina at FCT-NOVA. Covered the basics — image representation, contrast, brightness — then worked up to moving object detection, edge detection, and homography. All in Matlab.
Built products under deadline. Solved algorithms under pressure. Sometimes in the same year.
The IOI that year was in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Four students represented Portugal. A week of the hardest algorithmic problems I'd faced — a different scale from the national olympiad, competing against delegations from over 80 countries.
Tutored teams at the InsureTech AI Hackathon during Lisbon AI Week, representing Sonant. Teams were building AI solutions for insurance — I brought in what we had learned from doing it in production.
Portuguese university programming marathon — three-person team, five hours, no internet. We placed 5th nationally.
Not everything I speak is code.
Born into it. Still the language I reach for when something actually matters — when I'm precise, or tired, or angry.
Learned it young enough that the seams don't show. I work in it, think in it, write in it. Sometimes I draft something and only notice which language I used when I look back.
Seven Caminos will do that. Weeks walking with people from across Latin America and Spain. Conversational is understating it some days and overstating it on others.
Never formally studied it. Pieced it together from Spanish and a few months near Milan during my Polimi exchange. I can get through a dinner without embarrassing myself.
Studied it briefly in school and it never stuck. Enough to order, ask directions, and know when I've made the waiter uncomfortable.
Curaçao is where part of my family is. Papiamentu is what everyone speaks there — a creole layered from Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and a few other things on top. I picked up the basics while visiting. Enough to follow a conversation and attempt one. I want to keep learning it, which is a good reason to keep going back.
The Netherlands keeps coming up — professionally and geographically. This one feels like a practical thing to actually do rather than just say I will.
Haven't started. Fascinated by the script. I find myself copying Cyrillic by hand more often than I'd admit.
The other résumé.
Caminos walked. Pilgrims hosted. Dances won.
Hover for more information
Beyond the Desk.
Mountains climbed. Caminos walked. Skies jumped from.
Technical credentials are easy to list. The harder question is whether you'd want someone next to you for the long haul — on a difficult project, in a bad sprint, when things are breaking and everyone is tired.
I care about the room. At Accenture I organised a team awards night for the IDF team — think The Office's Dundies, but personalised. Custom categories, voted on by the team, printed certificates. Nobody asked me to do it. It just seemed like a thing worth doing.
Teams where people actually like each other are faster, more honest, and more durable. I've worked in both kinds. The difference isn't subtle.
IDF Dundies · Accenture · 2022
Mostly local. Some of it for a long time now.
World Youth Day brought around a million young people to Lisbon in 2023. Our parish was responsible for roughly 2,000 of them. I coordinated the local organizing committee from 2021 through the event — volunteers, logistics, finances, communications, pastoral programming. Three years of preparation for one week.
A week-long Catholic university mission, sent to Portuguese communities that request it. Students handle everything themselves — visits, activities, practical service work. I went five times over five years. Each edition is a different place, different people, different needs.
