All of the work.
None of the bureaucracy.
Forget about extra budget for taxes, insurance, and 401ks. Dynamics of an employee, with the ease of hiring a supplier.
Dynamics of an employee, ease of a supplier.
No worries about taxes and 401ks.
With my self-owned LLC, I work as an employee without the bureaucracy of one. I do the work, and I pay myself. No taxes, no 401ks, or insurance necessary.
Top of the line equipment.
I work with M1 and M3 MacBook Pros, and 32GB RAM 9th Gen i7 Windows 11 PCs. Multi-generation iPhones, iPads, as well as Android phones and tablets are also ready to test apps and sites on.
One contract, and we're set.
Leverage the same pipeline you already have in place for your suppliers. One agreement to cover my services, and I'm ready to go.
As a problem-solver first, if I'm not familiar with a particular technology, I'll figure it out and get it done. This non-exhaustive list are the ones I've already put through that test.
Shipped, in production, at scale.
Financial News London
One of Dow Jones' leading brands, renewed into a Next.js/TypeScript app. Pretty much all the UI elements were designed by a killer design team and built by me in at least some capacity.
WSJ+
The one where we took The Wall Street Journal, one of the world's most recognizable brands, and made it into a news aggregator. Following FN London's success, we leveraged the platform to consolidate WSJ, FN, MansionGlobal and other brands into one place.
Element Three Client Sites
Refactored Hoekstra Transportation and The Bus Center sites to a modernized WordPress custom theme using PHP. Achieved perfect Lighthouse scores. I got a shout out on LinkedIn for this one.
Routable Landing Page
I was the sole engineer dedicated to the landing page for the Routable.com website for a year. Built with Gatsby.js and JavaScript, integrating with Contentful CMS using GraphQL.
TIM Brasil Mobile Routing
The platform is internal, so no link for this one. Automations were built with Java and Python, while the interfaces were built with plain JavaScript, jQuery, and the YANG modeling language.
Almost twenty years of solving problems.
Software Engineering Lead
- Brand-new experiences launched for Financial News London, The Wall Street Journal, and Investor's Business Daily.
- Reduction of 80% data load and as much as 96% page load time.
- My code in production here serves over 40 million people on a monthly basis.
- Acted as a mentor / lead of teams up to 8-strong.
- Became one of the main liaisons between the development and stakeholder teams by fostering a communication culture.
Senior Software Engineer
- Helped deliver one of the best-in-class automated onboarding flows.
- Became the #1 code contributor to the codebase within a year.
Lead Software Engineer
- Pushed 16 new features impacting more than 30 million users with zero rollbacks or patches.
- Refactored the main codebase, reducing implementation time for new features by 30%.
- My code here serves over 30 million people on a daily basis.
- Led teams to implement features in telecoms based in EMEA.
Software Engineer
- Helped today's #1 adtech platform in Brazil create new forms of interaction with its clients by serving them new APIs and optimizing processes for increased responsiveness.
Strategic Planning Specialist, Part-Time SWE
- Architected, negotiated, and engineered an automation solution that saved 9,600 hours of administrative work annually.
- Those savings allowed for resource reallocation, and the intelligence I provided enabled initiatives generating over $400,000 in annual recurring revenue.
- Led teams of up to 6 people to create solutions that drove both savings and recurring revenue.
- I was the data person for the entirety of the Latin American operation, reporting daily to C-Level personnel in three countries.
Several Data Analytics Roles
- Led teams of up to 16 people to rebuild processes, saving 3,000 yearly hours of overtime alone.
- Was one of the key consultants that helped HSBC divest their retail operations in Brazil by making their financial processes audit-compliant.
- Provided analytics to save tens of thousands of dollars on in-flight supplies during my tenure in an airline company.
- Proactively created an automated process that reduced the loss of physical files in a banking branch by 99.9%.
Paying it forward: mentorship, on the house.
A formal tech education isn't within reach for everyone. Talent has never been in short supply, but access definitely is.
Without formal education in Computer Science myself, I know how hard it is to make it as an engineer. There's an abundance of free content out there, but it can be overwhelming without guidance and proper foundations.
I want to make this path easier for aspiring engineers from underrepresented and financially underserved communities, free of charge.
1:1 guidance
Regular one-on-one sessions built around where you actually are. No rigid curriculum, just the help you need next.
Code & career
From reading your first stack trace to preparing for your first interview, we cover the technical and the practical.
Real-world context
Hard-won lessons from shipping production code at scale. The things that don't make it into tutorials.
Always free
No fees. This is my way of widening the door that others once held open for me.
Want a mentor in your corner?
Whether you're writing your first lines of code or wondering what your next career move is, you're welcome here.
No cost, no prerequisites, but I do give underrepresented people the preference. Just reach out and tell me where you're headed.
Request mentorship → mentorships@rmfcastilho.comNeed a web app? I'm in. That legacy jQuery codebase no one wants to touch? I'm your guy. Someone to learn a new language to get something done? On it. Or maybe a slide deck showcasing the team performance? Done!
Some problems are solved with technology. Some are solved by spreadsheets and presentations. Others are solved over a coffee and a handshake.
I'm a problem-solver at the core, and coding is one of my tools.