Henrique Cardoso de Faria

Summary

Senior software engineer with 14+ years shipping production systems, mostly for startups, mostly remotely. Now operating as an agentic engineer: I direct AI agents to plan, write, review, and ship code rather than typing it myself. At BSPK I lead AI feature work for a luxury retail platform used by top-tier brands, and recently led a zero-downtime migration of the entire stack off Heroku to AWS — Kamal, Terraform, PlanetScale, Upstash, Elastic Cloud — cutting infrastructure cost by 60%+. I write publicly about the work at hencf.org/blog and help organize the Ruby community in Portugal.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer · BSPK

2020-08 – present · Remote · Viana do Castelo, PT

Primary backend engineer for a unified clienteling and commerce platform used by luxury luxury retail brands. Owned the AI layer end-to-end and led the recent infrastructure migration off Heroku.

Directed AI agents to deliver almost all production code shipped in 2026 — planning, reviewing, parallelizing features across worktrees, and tightening the feedback loop (faster CI, lighter PR review, agent-friendly architecture docs).
Led zero-downtime migration off Heroku to AWS in ~2.5 months, mostly solo. Postgres→PlanetScale, Redis→Upstash, Elasticsearch→Elastic Cloud, plus an Elixir Phoenix service off Gigalixir. Cost down 60%+.
Designed Kamal + Terraform deploy on EC2 with Caddy/kamal-proxy TLS, Tailscale private networking, Route 53 weighted DNS for cutover, CloudFront for assets, 1Password-backed secrets, CloudWatch monitoring, and a documented two-step cutover playbook.
Built a multi-agent AI assistant (orchestrator routing to specialist sub-agents — Client Intelligence, Tasks & Calendar) with provider-agnostic LLM access across OpenAI, Groq, and local models.
Shipped natural language search over Elasticsearch — sales associates query their client book in plain English ("clients who bought handbags last month and haven't been contacted").
Built a behavioral analytics pipeline from scratch — event capture across hundreds of endpoints, session materialization, metric rollups, sales-outcome correlation.
Owned the Shopify webhook pipeline end-to-end (order sync, geocoding-based customer assignment, staff resolution, data-quality enforcement).
Migrated the test suite from RSpec to Minitest; introduced pg_squeeze + pghero for Postgres maintenance and visibility.

Founder · Consultant · HC Digital Services LLC

2024-01 – present · Remote

Independent consulting on AI integration, Rails development, and system architecture. Currently fully on BSPK, but open to new conversations.

{"AI integration": "agentic systems, natural language search, structured LLM outputs, RAG pipelines."}
{"Rails work": "new features, API design, performance and upgrade work on large codebases."}
{Architecture: "data pipelines, Elasticsearch, real-time PubSub, third-party integrations (Shopify, payments)."}

Selected Projects

Espirita.club

Ruby on Rails

Multi-tenant SaaS for spiritist centers and federations in Brazil. Custom domains with automatic TLS, Stripe payments, REST API, and an MCP server so AI clients can integrate directly. · espirita.club

Guia Espírita

Ruby on Rails · PostgreSQL + pgvector

AI knowledge base for spiritist literature. RAG pipeline over public-domain books and video transcripts, with a conversational agent that answers with source references. · guia.espirita.club

Digitalmente

Ruby on Rails

Coding education platform for Portuguese schoolchildren. Maze programming, bug-hunt games, 3D-printer training, sign-making — all session-based for classroom use. · digitalmente.tech

hencf.org

Ruby on Rails 8.1 · SQLite

Open source personal site and writing platform. Importmap-only Rails (no Node), AI chat agent powered by RubyLLM and Groq, server-side analytics, Markdown blog rendering with custom OG image generation. · github.com/henriquecf/site

redis-pub-sub

Elixir

Bridge between Redis PubSub and Phoenix PubSub for real-time broadcasting. Born from production needs at BSPK. · github.com/henriquecf/redis-pub-sub

Writing

Long-form essays on agentic engineering, Ruby/Rails, and the AI work I'm doing day to day. Honest about what worked and what didn't — written for engineers who want concrete detail, not the vibes-only version of the AI conversation. Weekly, since early 2026 at hencf.org/blog.

Agentic engineering — directing Claude Code, hooks, custom commands, parallel worktrees
Ruby/Rails patterns — fixtures, testing, RSpec→Minitest, Hotwire
AI feature engineering — RAG, multi-agent systems, structured LLM outputs, local models
Infrastructure — Kamal deploys, multi-tenant SSL, SQLite at scale, Litestream backups

Recent posts:

Apr 2026 I Migrated BSPK Off Heroku in Two and a Half Months. I Barely Typed.
Apr 2026 I Built an LLM Wiki for My Kid
Apr 2026 Turbo Ate My Redirect
Apr 2026 From RAG to Wiki: What 600 Books Taught Me About Knowledge Compilation
Apr 2026 I Rewrote My Rails App in Elixir. AI Brought Me Back.

Skills

Primary: Ruby on Rails · Elixir / Phoenix · Agentic engineering (Claude Code, multi-agent orchestration) · LLM integration (RubyLLM, OpenAI, Groq, local models) · System architecture & data pipelines
Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, CloudWatch) · Kamal · Docker · Terraform · PlanetScale · PostgreSQL · SQLite · Elasticsearch (Elastic Cloud) · Redis (Upstash) · Sidekiq · Solid Queue · Tailscale · 1Password secrets
Practices: Zero-downtime migrations · Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) · Test-driven development (Minitest, RSpec, Capybara) · CI/CD (CircleCI, GitHub Actions)

Community

Euruko 2025

Local Organizer

Helped bring Europe's longest-running Ruby conference to Viana do Castelo after the community vote at Euruko 2024 in Sarajevo.

Open source

Contributor

ja_serializer, ruby-conferences.github.io, euruko.org, and other community projects.

Education

Universidade Federal de Goiás

Goiás, Brazil

Computer Science

Languages

Portuguese — Native
English — Fluent
Spanish — Conversational