About Me

Professional Summary

I'm João Blasques, an AI-enabled Data Engineer with around 8 years across data and software engineering — starting at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in 2002, then web development, GIS data analysis and BI at Universidade Nova de Lisboa — and I've been doing data engineering full-time since 2023. I build data platforms the way software should be built: tested transforms, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and data-quality gates that fail the build instead of writing a report nobody reads.

The unusual part of my CV is the middle: several years repairing wind-turbine blades, on ropes, offshore. That was a deliberate chapter — hands-on, high-stakes, detail-or-it-breaks work — and I brought its discipline back into software. I document decisions with their trade-offs, I verify claims against evidence, and I don't ship things I can't defend.

What "AI-enabled" means concretely: I run an agent-operated development workflow (Claude Code + CLI-first infrastructure) and I build AI systems — feature stores, embedding search, LLM-powered pipelines — as part of the data platform, not as a separate discipline.

Education

  • Master's degree, GeoSpatial Technologies — NOVA IMS Information Management School (2010–2012)
  • Bachelor's degree, Environmental Engineering Technology — Universidade Nova de Lisboa (1995–2001)

What I Work On

  • Medallion lakehouses on Databricks — Unity Catalog, Delta, Asset Bundles, serverless Jobs and Lakeflow/DLT (Vitals, MBTA)
  • Streaming and batch on the same dataset — Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka, Auto Loader
  • Data quality as gates, not reports — Great Expectations and dbt tests wired into CI
  • Cloud data infrastructure on GCP — GCS, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Terraform with keyless (WIF) CI
  • ML-adjacent plumbing — Feast feature store, pgvector search, MLflow tracking
  • Agent-operated pipelines: automation that proposes, a human that approves

The projects and posts pages show this work with the code public on GitHub — every claim above links to something you can read.

Beyond work

I volunteer time and skills where they're useful — I've done disaster-relief work (2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Tamil Nadu) and long-term social projects in India and the Philippines. These days I write about data engineering and AI tooling as I learn it, in public.