Paulo Cunha

Experience

1. Nov 2023 - Present

   Tech Lead / Lead Engineer

   GAN Integrity · Copenhagen, Denmark

   • Hands-on leadership: Wrote code while stepping in to build and lead 4 different teams through company restructures.

   • AI in Production: Early advocate for agentic coding. Set up our AI production basics (observability, prompts, cost control) and built an MCP-based architecture so services could expose tools directly to product agents.

   • Automating the easy questions: Built an internal RAG bot that answers ~50% of incoming CS-to-Engineering questions on its own.

   • Changing slow processes: Used Shape Up to take an initiative that had been stuck for months and ship it in 4 weeks. Introduced error logging, product analytics, and feature flags, to decouple deployments from releases.

   • Accelerating the team: Currently fixing frontend tech debt by restructuring the codebase for clear team ownership, adding a BFF layer, and building a component library.

   Tech: Angular · Typescript · Node.js · AWS · Kubernetes

2. Nov 2021 - Aug 2023

   Tech Lead / Lead Engineer

   Dixa · Copenhagen, Denmark

   • Shipping AI features faster: Shifted the AI team away from long research cycles to shipping production features (spam detection, topic clustering, semantic similarity) iteratively.

   • Reliable ML pipelines: Implemented experiment tracking, training pipelines with data traceability and assisted in data science and backend engineering tasks.

   • Scaling developer experience: Joined the Platform team to architect a monorepo setup and build a Backstage developer portal integrated into core internal systems.

   Tech: React · Typescript · Python · AWS Sagemaker · Kubernetes · Backstage

3. Oct 2019 - Jul 2021

   Founder

   Independent Venture

   • Trying to start a CAD startup: Quit my job to make CAD software act like an IDE with instant feedback and automated repetitive tasks so architects could focus on creativity. The insight was to use techniques from game engines.

   • Product & market lessons: Experienced firsthand why few startups work on CAD: the sheer amount of groundwork needed just to build a viable prototype.

   • Learning systems engineering: Prototyped rendering pipelines, a DSL interpreter, custom version control, and ECS architectures using Rust.

   Tech: Rust · Bazel · gfx-hal · Three.js · WebAssembly · React

4. Sep 2017 - Sep 2019

   Software Engineer

   Trustpilot · Copenhagen, Denmark

   • Scaling frontend across 8 teams: Co-led the product-wide move from AngularJS to React as part of a 2-person platform team by building shared libraries and reference code.

   • Enabling independent deploys: Built a service-worker-based microsites architecture that let teams deploy independently without sacrificing performance or client UX.

   • Better UI in less time: Created a strict design system which made bad UI decisions almost impossible to code and dropping UI development times from weeks to hours.

   Tech: React · Redux · AngularJS · Typescript · AWS

5. May 2013 - May 2016

   Architect

   MER Architects · Stockholm, Sweden

   • Standardized Workflows: Sped up our team's workflow by building and maintaining standard BIM models and project template files.

   • Activity Based Design: Designed office space layouts tailored to how clients actually worked—developing user-centric insights I later brought into software development.

Education

1. Aug 2010 - Jun 2012

   Master Degree, Architecture

   Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts · Copenhagen, Denmark

2. Sep 2006 - Jun 2010

   Bachelor, Architecture

   Instituto Superior Tecnico · Lisbon, Portugal

   • Led student association (NucleAr), organizing talks and events; resurrected the digital lab and restored student access to the laser cutter.

Speaking & Credentials