About
Staff Engineer focused on distributed systems, platform modernisation, and technical strategy. I lead complex migrations across messy estates, improve reliability and cost posture, and align architecture with business priorities across complex environments.
I am a Staff Engineer focused on modernising complex systems and helping organisations make better technical decisions under real-world constraints. My work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, migration strategy, reliability, and technical leadership.
I tend to operate where systems are large, estates are messy, and progress depends on aligning multiple teams around clear architecture, sequencing, and trade-offs. Recent work includes reducing a 30+ service and interface estate to 2 APIs and 1 event remaining, cutting incidents in a critical integration layer by about 30%, and reducing cloud infrastructure spend by 30%. I bring a commercial lens as well as a technical one, shaped by experience across software, operations, and running a business.
My career has taken me from early engineering and technical leadership roles at companies like NTS Radio and Palace Skateboards, to critical platforms and products in energy, payments, and public services including Kaluza, Tesco, and HMRC.
Impact
- Kaluza: Staff Engineer leading modernisation across Orex and other legacy platforms across 6 teams; reduced the 30+ service and interface Orex estate to 2 APIs and 1 event, migrated the Payments API gateway, clarified ownership across 80+ customer communications, mentored 3 team leads, and helped reduce incidents across the Kaluza/OVO platform by about 30%.
- Hopin: Staff Engineer focused on reliability, observability, and cost efficiency during hyper-growth on a platform used by 100,000+ organisations; reduced cloud infrastructure spend by 30% and led event-experience work across existing and greenfield products, including adaptive streaming infrastructure for virtual events (Patent US-11522934-B1).
- Palace Skateboards: Early technical leader helping scale peak-demand commerce systems to handle order rates of up to 5,000 per minute and tripling day-to-day warehouse fulfilment speed.
Commercial Perspective
Co-founded and ran Antipode, a specialty coffee business in London, building practical experience in operations, margins, supply chains, and how technical decisions connect to business reality.
Built an early open-source StatsD client for C# that was later adopted by Datadog.
Beyond Engineering
Active in music through releases, production, and radio; more at goncalopereira.com/music.
Feel free to get in touch.