Rafael Polo — CV

Professional Experience

– now
Freelance Data & Visualization Engineer
Basel, Switzerland
  • Large-scale cartography platforms and network mapping
  • Offline-first system prototyping
  • Shipped open source: helvetiscan, baseldosdados, swissviz, VISO
–
Swisscom — DevOps Engineer
Zurich, Switzerland
  • Maintained and modernized 28 mission-critical internal services used daily by field-operations teams
  • Delivered features in Ruby on Rails within a SAFe Agile environment
  • Deployed and operated on Docker & Kubernetes under strict SLAs
  • Improved CI/CD to support frequent, low-risk releases
–
EDGE Empower® — Senior Technical Lead
Zug, Switzerland
  • First in-house technical hire
  • Built a modern offline PayTool replacing the legacy system, cutting processing time by 98%
  • Parallelized the CI/CD pipeline, build time from 14 to 4 minutes
  • Contracted and coached 3 external developers and a UX designer
–
ExtraPolo — Software Engineer & Consultant
Rio de Janeiro · Berlin · Athens · Lisbon
  • 40+ projects in civic tech, data journalism, culture & arts and open source: data investigations, web platforms, interactive installations, CMS systems
  • The Intercept Brasil: investigative data pipelines
  • Connectas / Grupo Bruto: ownership-network platform
  • Rio de Janeiro Environmental Secretariat: water-quality reporting platform
–
GFOSS.eu / Code + Create — Web Programming Teacher
Athens, Greece
  • Taught web programming (HTML, CSS, jQuery) to refugee and Greek youth through the EU-funded Code + Create initiative
–
Tactical Tech Collective — Full-Stack Web Architect & Developer
Berlin, Germany
  • Built investigative data tools and platforms under the Exposing the Invisible team (Ruby on Rails, data visualization)
–
Trommsdorff + Drüner — Developer
Berlin, Germany
  • Business-intelligence dashboards for the marketing consultancy's innovation team
–
Meio — Co-founder
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Coworking space shared with architects and designers
–
Cortex Intelligence — Developer
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • Competitive-intelligence and data-mining R&D team
–
Early career — Developer & SysAdmin
Rio de Janeiro · Teresópolis, Brazil
  • Logical Systems: system administration and application development
  • INPP — Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Públicas: main developer of its planning software
  • MeuServidor: co-founded a Linux & PHP web-hosting service

Selected Projects

  • Rodado: ~730 Brazilian public datasets, 1 TB of Parquet, DuckDB, natural-language-to-SQL over MCP
  • HelvetiScan: scanner and mapper of 2.5M+ Swiss .ch domains (HTTP, DNS, TLS, WHOIS, CVE)
  • 40+ open-source projects across data analysis, visualization, automation and AI tooling: browse the project graph | [github.com/rafapolo]

Tech Skills

Languages & Frameworks
Python Ruby on Rails TypeScript React SQL HTML · CSS · JavaScript
Data & AI
PostgreSQL ETL & Data Engineering AI Agents · RAG · LangChain LLM Integrations Crawling & Scraping
DevOps & Infra
Docker Kubernetes CI/CD AWS Linux Git
Architecture
REST API Design System Architecture · MVC · OOP

Education

Postgraduate in Data Science for Finance
NOVA IMS Information Management School
Lisbon, Portugal
–
Master in Information Systems
Research Area: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (PPGI/UNIRIO)
Extension in Digital Culture
Communication School (ECO/UFRJ)
Rio de Janeiro Federal University
–
Bachelor in Computer Science
Centro Universitário Metodista Bennett
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
–
Java Software Development
Department of Electronic Computation (NCE/UFRJ)
Rio de Janeiro Federal University
Linux System Engineer
M.Cury Computação
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Languages

Portuguese native English full professional Spanish full professional German B1 · telc Greek A2

Certifications

Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP) Databricks for Data Engineering Gen AI Foundational Models for NLP Generative AI & LLMs: Architecture & Data Prep AI Agents using RAG & LangChain

Fellowships and Awards

Moedax — Celo & Zcash Foundation Grants
Won competitive grants from the Celo and Zcash foundations to build a Web3 payments platform — authored smart contracts and bridged Web2/Web3 with a CBDC
WebDoc Graffiti Platform
Collaborative Cartographies Initiatives, by the Brazilian Federal Ministry of Culture | [website]
Damnatio Memoriae | Software-Art
Gallery & book publication by Memefest: International Festival of Social Responsive Communication & Art | [website]
CAPES Fellowship for Postgraduate Research
By the Brazilian Federal Ministry of Education

Exhibitions

Connecting Cities – Prototyping Lab
Making visible the hidden changes that shape our cities. Transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin | [website]
Pensar Público
Exhibition on dynamic and real-time city mapping. Centro Carioca de Design, Studio-X, Rio de Janeiro | [website]
Galeria TAC | Vênus-Terra
Presentation of the "Variation" artwork, Rio de Janeiro | [website]
Abotoados pela Manga
Three-week art-and-politics residency during the 29th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo | [video]
ExtraPolo Labs since 1985