Miguel Saraiva
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Engineer and Developer
Lisbon, Portugal
Toptal member since September 26, 2016
Miguel has twenty years and counting of programming and software architecture experience, from super fast multithreaded engines to ultra distributed crawling services, market research, online news gathering, and game development. He works with technologies including Assembly, (already forgotten) ALGOL 68, ZBuffers, the C family, and Azure.
Portfolio
Experience
- C++ - 20 years
- C# - 15 years
- Azure - 10 years
- Web Scraping - 10 years
- JavaScript - 6 years
- Node.js - 5 years
- Unity3D - 5 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Visual Studio, C++, C#
The most amazing...
...thing I've built is a system on Azure Cloud with dynamically distributed physics engine calculations over new nodes based on client entrance/exit.
Work Experience
Web Scraping Expert
RTW Investments
- Implemented a scraping procedure that notifies users more quickly than the site's own notification system.
- Developed a comprehensive system for scraping, managing, and notifying users of posts and comments on Facebook, based on boolean keyword expressions.
- Developed an extensive system for scraping, managing, and notifying users of posts and comments on Reddit, utilizing boolean keyword expressions.
- Implemented all systems using Python and Selenium, running autonomously on Azure VMs.
Software Engineer
Alteryx - Localization
- Found a major bug that had been around the product for several years, merging C++, C#, and external libraries.
- Understood all aspects of the team I worked with, as well as all aspects of licensing—from clients to servers, applications, and end-user web portals.
- Helped other peers in onboarding the team and projects.
Developer
Planiter
- Built a system from the ground up to crawl and scrape Australian sites, gathering information and making it available to customers using a map front end. Some information is downloaded in real time from open APIs to ease the users' work.
- Integrated the work of developers from around the world into our own system.
- Developed APIs for external clients to access our collected data from their own services and applications. Amazon EC2 machines are serving those APIs.
Developer
Rockford Financial LLC
- Developed a script for automating the buying process of Shopify and Demandware-based stores.
- Adjusted the script to to mimic human behavior and overcome CAPTCHA-based protections.
- Adjusted TLS security handshakes to overcome bot protections.
Back-end Developer
SimplGrid
- Developed an advanced backup solution from the ground up.
- Implemented transparent backup to several media, including local, network, and cloud providers.
- Implemented storage providers as interface objects, reducing dependencies on the whole project and making it possible to add newer storage paradigms.
Chief Technology Officer
Vosdal Studios
- Developed a distributed physics engine using Azure and C# for the back end. The relevance is that the MMO needs—using distributed computing—to cope with any number of simultaneous players, all in a single server farm.
- Built frameworks for ease of working with online data storage, Facebook's Parse.com, Azure Storage, and SQL.
- Created several algorithms to fuse vector and metadata information from OpenStreetMap with satellite altimetry maps to generate realistic terrain for in-game use.
- Used the above developments in-house and on several desktop, Android, and iOS games using Unity3D mainly as the front end. The same services were utilized with XNA for Windows Phone.
Freelance Research and Development Consultant
GfK - Growth from Knowledge
- Consulted on matters of audience research methodology.
- Optimized database access and data generation processes with C#, T-SQL, and SQL database technologies.
- Consulted for requirements gathering for new markets.
Chief Technology Officer
Markdata
- Architected and developed an online information gathering framework (web scraping) for internal news clipping processes using C#, Azure Compute and Storage, XPath parser, and SQL.
- Architected and developed the multimedia data fusion engine framework and algorithm. Created it in C# for added modularity, expansion, and flexibility.
- Architected a web service for an audience and planning engine for client and internal use.
- Accepted clients' requests and designed the necessary architecture, deciding on the best tech stacks to help multi-disciplinary teams built to fit clients' expectations.
Senior Software Developer
Markdata
- Developed next-generation television audience analysis software using graphic UI, MFC, and OWL.
- Built fast calculation engines for several clients and products. Used both internally and for some selected client apps. Made integrations using extended stored procedures for SQL server.
- Bootstrapped most of the products's language and tech stack from C to C++.
Senior Software Developer
Marktest
- Designed and developed DOS-based solutions for television audience reporting.
- Designed and developed Windows-based solutions for television audience reporting.
- Spearheaded the use of C++ in the development team.
Experience
RIVERZ
This was the back-end service for a multi-platform game working on desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile machines (Android and iOS)
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa - Lisbon, Portugal
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Sockets, Google Maps, Node.js, Google Maps SDK, Xamarin.Android, Amazon Product Advertising API, Bing Maps API, OpenStreetMap API, LINQ, XNA, Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)
Tools
Microsoft Visual Studio, Fiddler, Blender, TFS, Subversion (SVN), CVS, Git, Visual Studio, Skype, Hyper-V, Bitbucket, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, IntelliJ IDEA, SoapUI, Jira, Confluence
Languages
C++, XPath, C, C#, JavaScript, Python, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), BASIC, Pascal, CSS, HTML, TypeScript, OWL, SQL, Java
Frameworks
.NET, Unity, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Unity3D, Electron, Express.js, Scrapy
Paradigms
Distributed Programming, Waterfall Development, Agile Software Development, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Concurrent Programming, Object-oriented Design (OOD), REST
Platforms
Windows, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Parse, MacOS, Linux, Amazon EC2
Storage
JSON, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Azure SQL Databases, Datadog
Other
Web Crawlers, Back-end, Architecture, Scalability, Multithreading, Game Development, Web Scraping, TCP/IP, Return Path Data, Xamarin.Forms, Shader Technologies, Unity Shaders, CI/CD Pipelines, Game Physics, OpenStreetMap, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Protocol Buffers, SOAP
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring