Hugo is currently unavailable
Hugo Barrigas
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end and DevOps Developer
Porto, Portugal
Toptal member since July 12, 2021
Bio
Hugo is a software engineer with 10 years of experience specializing in scalable, resilient, and self-healing cloud-native architectures. He has worked with all major cloud providers and architected several cloud-native solutions. Hugo is a software craftsman at heart with a strong passion for DevOps and site reliability engineering. He recently created Flare, a GitOps workflow orchestrator.
Portfolio
Secret
Rust, Performance, Trading, Infrastructure
Grafbase
Rust, WebAssembly (Wasm), Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS)...
Rhapsody
Java, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Spring Boot, Rust
Experience
- Java - 7 years
- Kubernetes - 5 years
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - 5 years
- DevOps - 5 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 4 years
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - 3 years
- Go - 3 years
- Azure - 2 years
Work Experience
Principal Platform Engineer
2024 - PRESENT
Secret
- Became part of the core and trading teams, contributing to a very high throughput and low latency trading engine and the platform built around it.
- Took on responsibilities spanning from infrastructure provisioning on AWS to software development (Rust).
- Demonstrated my SRE skills when fine-tuning tail latency using observability and alerts (SLOs with error budgeting).
Technologies: Rust, Performance, Trading, Infrastructure
Lead Software Engineer
2023 - 2024
Grafbase
- Revamped the core architecture and designed it to scale by leveraging Workers for Platforms. This required an overhaul of the existing services blueprint and how we did customers' deployments.
- Led the edge caching solution that backs our <50-millisecond claim.
- Oversaw the KV store and AI solutions accessible in customer resolvers.
- Profiled the different layers and pieces that formed our customer deployment pipeline and critical request paths to drastically improve cold starts.
- Designed and built the internal versioning strategy, allowing us to evolve the platform with internal breaking changes to keep customers' deployments retro-compatible and a friendly upgrade path.
- Explored the exciting potential of Rust and WebAssembly (Wasm) in the context of edge computing.
Technologies: Rust, WebAssembly (Wasm), Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon DynamoDB, Terraform
Lead Software Engineer
2021 - 2023
Rhapsody
- Led the team that completely revamped the ingestion platform. At peak, we ingested TB of data from record labels. We were the major contributors to the platform.
- Designed the new architecture to follow an event-driven microservices (Rust and Java) pattern, taking full advantage of Google Cloud Platform services like Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, and Storage.
- Built a fully scalable and resilient data pipeline with different integrations for delivery that could scale with the business and easily ingest the current volume of data.
- Developed and standardized several infrastructure components for the organization.
- Defined a curated list of metrics and alerts to have complete visibility of the data pipeline with the added value of tracing with custom metadata to have granular visibility of specific data ingestion.
Technologies: Java, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Spring Boot, Rust
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
2021 - 2022
Kraken
- Led observability and alerting in the core back end. Standardized SLOs across the organization by creating a framework to define SLOs and standardized dashboards to visualize them. The alerting on these SLOs used a multi-window, multi-burn pattern.
- Improved continuous deployment pipelines and their performance, which contributed to a substantial decrease in time to deployment and direct business impact.
- Reviewed and provided advice on architectural patterns and deployments.
- Provisioned a public-facing infrastructure for a highly secure environment.
- Advised and worked on mature architectures for mission-critical components within high-availability and low-latency environments.
- Provisioned highly available Kafka and Redis clusters using Terraform and Nomad.
- Used Rust extensively in an event-driven microservices architecture that powered the core business. Contributed continuously to a codebase shared across hundreds of engineers.
Technologies: Terraform, Nomad, Vault, Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka, Redis, Prometheus, Grafana, Rust
Creator
2020 - 2021
Flare
- Took Flare from an idea to a fully working solution: a GitOps-driven workflow orchestrator.
- Implemented several Kubernetes operators that back power custom resource definitions, allowing users to create, glue, and orchestrate workflows.
- Designed and implemented APIs to expose read data to different observers. This involved a custom dashboard built on React and a command-line interface developed using Go.
Technologies: Go, Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform, Java, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), React, APIs
Lead Software Engineer
2020 - 2021
Mindera
- Led the team that designed and implemented a highly performant GraphQL Java framework.
- Added several resilient techniques that were applicable to resolvers and fully configurable through annotations or configuration.
- Designed the interface that provided interoperability with existing frameworks, with Spring and Vert.x supported out of the box.
- Designed the interface that provided interoperability with any communication transport, with HTTP and RSockets supported out of the box.
Technologies: Java, GraphQL, Spring, Vert.x
Lead DevOps Engineer
2019 - 2020
Mindera
- Spearheaded the DevOps team that built the infrastructure needed to support a new cloud-based architecture in Azure for IoT.
- Designed the multiregional solution to be fault-tolerant, scalable, and resilient, considering disaster recovery scenarios.
- Leveraged the power of Kubernetes with the observability and traffic management of Isito Service Mesh.
- Implemented CI/CD workflows to facilitate streamlined deployments using Azure DevOps.
- Contributed to site reliability best practices by defining SLIs and SLOs, increasing observability, and nurturing a proactive mindset to deal with errors.
- Implemented an automated and progressive release process through observable canary deployments.
- Designed and implemented monitoring solutions: log and data aggregation using Prometheus and Loki and monitoring via Grafana.
- Automated incident alerts based on metric baselines and error budgeting.
Technologies: Go, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, GitOps, Flux, Istio, Grafana, Prometheus, Azure, DevOps Engineer, DevOps, Internet of Things (IoT), CI/CD Pipelines
Senior Software Engineer
2017 - 2019
HOLD
- Served as the lead platform engineer and architect, helping the team build a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture on GCP.
- Participated in the design and implementation of an event-based microservice architecture and owned several services responsible for different areas of the platform: wallet, market data ingestion, notifications, and events processing.
- Designed and implemented a flexible CI/CD pipeline, based on Jenkins and Kubernetes, to streamline the deployment of mission-critical services.
- Implemented core components that interacted with Ethereum blockchain to ingest on-chain data.
Technologies: Java, Spring, Kotlin, Reactor, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), PostgreSQL, CI/CD Pipelines
Software Engineer
2015 - 2017
Mindera
- Participated in the migration of a legacy platform to a cloud-based microservice architecture.
- Contributed to the design and implementation of several mission-critical services: wagering; payments; user registration; and real-time betting data, such as odds, jockeys, and pools.
- Assisted with setting up continuous delivery pipelines, which is where I acquired my taste for DevOps and Kubernetes.
- Understood how important observability is in complex architectures composed of several pieces, from the data tier all the way to the client perspective.
- Defined and ran several performance tests, using Gatling, and established foundational baselines for expected good service performance.
Technologies: Java, JavaScript, Spring, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Terraform, GraphQL, Continuous Delivery (CD)
Project History
Flare
Took Flare from a conceptual idea to a Kubernetes-native solution that orchestrates and automates the DevOps experience. Users can declare their infrastructure and software continuous delivery using declarative and versioned workflows. They can also enjoy a unified, graph-based view of their architecture.
Education
2007 - 2013
Master's Degree in Software Engineering
Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra - Coimbra, Portugal
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Reactor, React
Tools
Terraform, Jenkins, AWS CloudFormation, Envoy Proxy, Helm, Istio, Grafana, Vault
Languages
Go, Java, GraphQL, Kotlin, JavaScript, Rust
Frameworks
Spring, Vert.x, Flux, Spring Boot
Paradigms
DevOps, Continuous Delivery (CD), Automation
Platforms
Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, Cloud Native, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apache Kafka
Storage
Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB
Other
Engineering Software, GitOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Prometheus, APIs, DevOps Engineer, Internet of Things (IoT), CI/CD Pipelines, Nomad, WebAssembly (Wasm), Cloudflare, Performance, Trading, Infrastructure
Collaboration That Works
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
1
Share your needs
Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2
Choose your talent
Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3
Start your risk-free talent trial
Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring