João Rodrigues

Experience

1. Senior Data Engineer & Product Owner · Critical TechWorks · BMW Group

   Jul 2025 – now

   Lead product planning with BMW stakeholders, turning business requirements into clear engineering deliverables and setting the architecture for new API-first data surfaces. Mentor engineers on code quality and brought AI agents into the team's daily work, automating technical documentation and speeding up tech-debt fixes.

2. Senior Data Engineer & Scrum Master · Critical TechWorks · BMW Group

   May 2024 – Jul 2025

   Scaled the product from one to three cross-functional feature teams with Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS). Led technical interviews for data engineering hires, standardised onboarding, and taught internal Academy modules on DevOps, CI/CD and GenAI.

3. Data Engineer · Critical TechWorks · BMW Group

   May 2021 – May 2024

   Migrated decades of legacy data to an AWS streaming lakehouse (ECS, Glue, Kinesis, Iceberg), reusing infrastructure through Terraform modules and cutting costs significantly.

4. Data Engineer / Data Analyst · BNP Paribas

   2019 – 2021

   Built ETL pipelines in a strictly regulated banking environment, in full compliance with the European Banking Authority's stress-testing frameworks. Processed large risk datasets with PySpark and Hive, and built automated dashboards that put compliance KPIs in front of executives.

Selected projects

• Acultura-teA "Letterboxd for culture" in Portugal, built AI-native with spec-driven development. A Dagster pipeline scrapes, translates and embeds events from dozens of venues for semantic search, and a LangGraph agent swarm on Telegram runs the back-office, with every change gated on human confirmation.Read more
• Home serverA Raspberry Pi 5 as media center, VPN gateway and secure tunnel, built to set and forget, and written up as a five-part series.Read more
• This siteThe flat you're standing in: Next.js and Phaser, hand-drawn sprites, synthesised sound, daily Python ETLs from Unsplash and Plex, and shared scoreboards on Redis.Read more

Stack

Data

PythonSQLPySparkApache IcebergHiveDagsterPostgreSQL

Cloud

AWSTerraformECSGlueLambdaKinesisS3CI/CDDocker

AI

AI agentsLangGraphembeddings and semantic search

Leadership

Team scalingTechnical hiringMentoringScrum and LeSSRoadmap and backlog ownership

Web

TypeScriptNext.jsSupabase