
Miguel Duarte
Verified Expert in Engineering
JavaScript Developer
Lisbon, Portugal
Toptal member since October 24, 2016
Miguel is a hands-on full-stack and AI engineer who, as the founding CTO of Care&, built a healthcare platform from scratch into an AI-native product: a custom AI Scribe, patient-facing assistants, and agentic operations automation. On the executive team, he helped grow the business to 7-figure revenue while leading a small engineering team. He applies frontier AI across the business: engineering, QA, infrastructure costs, SEO, and ads, giving AI agents the feedback loops to iterate and ship.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 16 years
- Node.js - 11 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 9 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 9 years
- React - 9 years
- Large Language Models (LLMs) - 3 years
- TypeScript - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), JetBrains IDE, Git, MacOS, Google Cloud, Claude Code
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is building an AI-native healthcare platform end-to-end, from the first line of code to the AI Scribe clinicians use every day.
Work Experience
CTO
Care & Family Health
- Architected and built the company's healthcare platform end-to-end as founding CTO, from the first commit to the system that runs every aspect of a multi-provider primary care practice: patient-facing apps, clinical tooling, and infrastructure.
- Led the platform's evolution into an AI-native product: a custom AI Scribe that drafts visit notes and summarizes charts, patient-facing AI assistants for intake and booking, and an AI inbox that routes and drafts replies to patient messages.
- Served on the executive team from inception, shaping product strategy and growth as the company scaled to seven-figure annual revenue.
- Ran an AI-first engineering and business practice, applying frontier models to development, QA, infrastructure cost optimization, and growth (SEO and ads), and giving AI agents the tools to iterate and verify their work (CI, infrastructure, logging).
- Built agent-based automation for back-office operations such as user provisioning, scheduling, and administrative workflows, substantially reducing manual operational work.
- Hired, mentored, and led a small engineering team, owning technical direction, code quality, and delivery across all projects.
- Implemented security and privacy by design for sensitive health data (PHI), with encryption at rest and in transit across all components, in line with Canadian healthcare privacy requirements (PHIPA).
- Designed and operated the company's cloud infrastructure on AWS (ECS, S3, DynamoDB, SNS, and SQS) with Docker-based CI/CD, reliably serving 50,000+ patients while optimizing resource costs.
- Integrated dozens of third parties, including payments (Stripe), government health systems (OHIP, Ontario Ministry of Health), HL7 clinical data exchange, eFax, telephony (Twilio, Microsoft Teams), and AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google).
- Implemented fully-featured telemedicine capability into the system, where patients can have video appointments with a practitioner.
Full-stack Developer
Kaja (via Toptal)
- Developed an intelligent itinerary planner accounting for user preferences and point-of-interest properties (location, rating, category) using machine learning techniques such as spatial clustering and genetic algorithms.
- Built a recommender system for events based on the users' Facebook liked pages. The system further cross-referenced the Facebook data with Last.fm's API to discern musical tastes.
- Added i18n to the product (both static and dynamic elements) using Microsoft Azure's Cognitive Services for automatic cached content translation.
- Implemented a customized itinerary viewer with Google Maps.
- Developed custom map overlays and integrated with the Directions API with client-side caching.
- Handled the complete redesign/rebranding of the website.
Invited Assistant Professor
Universidade Europeia (Laureate International Universities)
- Taught and handled the curricular unit databases given to first-year students majoring in game and app development.
- Taught and contributed to the curricular unit computer architecture given to first-year students majoring in computer science and computer science with management.
- Placed in the top 10% of faculty with regard to student satisfaction.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Instituto de Telecomunicações
- Developed a novel technique to automatically synthesize neural-based control for robots with complex morphologies.
- Built a client-server application to interact with the V-REP robotics simulator via its API, enabling the parallel and distributed evaluation of robotic controllers.
- Published three peer-reviewed publications in evolutionary robotics.
- Won the Fraunhofer Portugal Challenge 2016 for my PhD research work.
Doctoral Researcher
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)
- Developed a novel artificial intelligence approach for automatic synthesis of robotic control.
- Designed and developed the hardware, software, and artificial intelligence for a real-world swarm robotics system.
- Published 24 peer-reviewed publications in evolutionary robotics and AI.
- Maintained and improved a custom distributed computing system.
- Applied digital fabrication techniques for fast, iterative hardware design.
- Won a Paper of Excellence award (IEEE ICDL-EPIROB, 2012), was nominated for a Best Paper award (PPSN, 2016), and won a Best Robot Video award (AAAI Video Competition, 2016).
- Wrote my PhD thesis and won the "Fraunhofer Challenge" (Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS) and the "Best PhD Thesis in Robotics" award (Portuguese Robotics Society).
Teaching Assistant
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL)
- Taught the curricular unit: Introduction to Programming to first-year students majoring in computer science, computer science with management, and computer science with telecommunications.
- Taught the curricular unit: Object-Oriented Programming to first-year students majoring in computer science, computer science with management, and computer science with telecommunications.
- Organized multiple events at the university in collaboration with the local IEEE student branch.
Web Developer
PTWS Lda
- Developed custom full-stack eCommerce solutions based on open-source platforms.
- Created third-party payment gateways for multiple eCommerce platforms.
- Managed a small team of developers and coordinated client project deliveries.
- Installed, configured, and developed modules for web software (Joomla, PrestaShop, WHMCS, and more).
Experience
JBotEvolver
https://github.com/BioMachinesLab/jbotevolverConillon
https://github.com/BioMachinesLab/conillonA Sea of Robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBrkszUnms8Color Orbs
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/color-orbs/9wzdncrdrhpfJhip8
https://github.com/miguelduarte42/Jhip8Chip8JS
https://github.com/miguelduarte42/Chip8JSA working version can be found at the link below:
http://miguelduarte.pt/2012/07/09/chip-8-emulator-in-javascript/
Moppy and Floppy Guitar
Education
PhD in Computer Science
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) - Lisbon, Portugal
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) - Lisbon, Portugal
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) - Lisbon, Portugal
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Twilio API, Google Maps, React, jQuery, Socket.IO, OpenCV, Ggplot2, Claude API, OpenAI API, Stripe, WebRTC
Tools
PrestaShop, Eclipse IDE, RedBean ORM, Git, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Claude Code, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Transcribe
Languages
Java, CSS, HTML, SQL, JavaScript, PHP, Assembly, Sass, XML, C#, C, Prolog, R, Python, TypeScript
Frameworks
ASP.NET, Redux, Swagger, AngularJS, Express.js, Material UI
Paradigms
Object-oriented Programming (OOP), REST, HIPAA Compliance
Platforms
MacOS, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows, Eclipse, Docker, Firebase, Vertex AI
Storage
JSON, MySQL, Redis, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, Google Cloud, Amazon DynamoDB
Other
Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Networks, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Technical Leadership, Ajax, Prompt Engineering, WebSockets, Telemedicine, Electronic Health Records (EHR), Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), V-REP, Machine Learning, Electronics, JetBrains IDE, Robot Operating System (ROS), Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Agents, HL7, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Vite, Speech-to-Text (STT), Deepgram, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Algorithms
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