Luiz Chagas
Staff Engineer
I’m a software engineering leader with a Computer Engineering background and more than a decade of experience building products, and occasionally building the teams behind them.
Today I’m Staff Engineer at Crema in Kansas City: technical leadership (architecture, standards, mentoring) plus hands-on development on complex client work. I’m also an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, which mostly means I read pricing pages with respect.
I care about great user experience and code that future-me won’t resent: readable, tested when it counts, and as simple as the problem allows.
- Email luiz@luizchagas.com
- GitHub github.com/luiz-chagas
- LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/luizchagas
Staff-level individual contributor with a leadership-shaped calendar: solution architecture, engineering standards, code review, and mentoring across teams, while still shipping on high-impact client projects. The title says IC; the git log says otherwise.
Led technical strategy across Crema’s engineering operations. Managed 5 to 12 engineers with hands-on coaching and career development. Owned solution architecture for digital transformation work and stayed involved in sales and business development when the problem was interesting enough to deserve a whiteboard.
Lead developer on enterprise products for major clients. Provided internal leadership in React, React Native, TypeScript, and unit testing. Partnered with stakeholders on scope, roadmaps, and sprint planning, turning “we need it yesterday” into something shippable.
Built enterprise and public-facing products with React and TypeScript, collaborating daily with designers and product managers under agile workflows.
Independent contractor building full-stack web apps, often the kind with real-time updates, WebSockets, and legacy code that needed a gentler touch (or fewer memory leaks).
Produced InfoSec compliance reports across offices on five continents. Monitored a SIEM environment and worked with IT leadership on ISO/IEC 27000 standards: the unglamorous kind of security work that keeps auditors employed.
Contributed to a large ERP system in Java and PostgreSQL. Reworked SQL queries that cut execution time by up to 90% in some cases. My first love letter to performance tuning.
Helped build Vera from scratch with a team of four (designer, two devs, marketing). We shipped the first version in 16 days, launched Thanksgiving 2019, because deadlines are a lifestyle. Vera hit both app stores hard: 200k+ registered users and 30k daily active users before Bloomscape acquired it in May 2020. Not bad for software that reminds you to water a fern.
Open-source NPM package that pulls current stock data from Yahoo Finance, born as a side effect of a personal robo-advisor experiment. The advisor’s track record is classified; the library worked fine.
Off the clock: kids, soccer, church, grilling, and coffee. 🍻
On the clock (or suspiciously adjacent to it), I like going deep on CS and software craft. You may find me reading textbooks for fun; the good ones earn a permanent spot on the shelf. Lately I’m also obsessed with getting AI to build what I actually want, with guardrails tight enough that it hallucinates less than my junior self did in college.
I’m friendly by default and try to leave code reviews kinder than I found them.
Validates designing scalable, cost-effective infrastructure on AWS: compute, storage, networking, and cloud-native architecture. Yes, I still check the free tier.