mota.shFounding Engineer
Plutus Media, England, 2025 to now
- Architected and shipped web, mobile, backend, data and AI end to end.
- Built the tech team's end-to-end processes from scratch, hiring included.
From mechanical engineering to software.
Founding engineer. I design, build and ship software across the stack, from cloud infrastructure to the interface.
Currently at
Things I have built.
Across web, mobile, data and infrastructure. Hover a row to see what is inside. Tap a row to open it.
- Dashboards, admin consoles and approval workflows.
- Role-based permissions, feature flags and a shared component library.
- Reports, exports and email generation built into the interface.
- Sign-in with phone, Apple and Google, plus push notifications and guided onboarding.
- Pull-to-refresh, haptics and animated progress screens.
- One codebase for iOS, Android and the web.
- REST APIs in Express and TypeScript, with token-based access.
- Python services on FastAPI and Flask, documented with OpenAPI.
- Rate limiting, request validation and role-based access on every route.
- Organic social and paid-ads data collected on schedules and event rules.
- Step Functions for multi-stage workflows, with retries and error handling.
- MySQL, DynamoDB and Redis, with connection pooling and per-client data isolation.
- Complete pipelines: ingest data, enrich it with models, embed, cluster and serve it back.
- A research assistant that streams its answers, calls a large catalogue of tools in a loop and cites every source.
- Retrieval over private documents and the live web, with hybrid search on vector embeddings.
- Multimodal models that turn video, images and text into structured data, and summaries and insights written on a schedule.
- Jev, a judgment model that works alongside Claude to grade content, with a fallback when it is unavailable.
- Evals, replays and rate limits that keep answers measurable and costs predictable.
- Infrastructure as code with Terraform, AWS CDK and CloudFormation.
- Containers on Lambda and ECS, with dev, staging and production kept apart.
- Alarms, secrets, encryption keys and cost alerts set up from the start.
- Marketing and careers sites, with structured data and share images for search.
- Report generators and analysis scripts that turn raw data into finished documents.
- A C++20 solver for detonation and combustion equilibrium, with its own linear algebra.
- A Wood-Kirkwood detonation model in Python, and genetic and particle-swarm optimisers in MATLAB.
Web applications
- Dashboards, admin consoles and approval workflows.
- Role-based permissions, feature flags and a shared component library.
- Reports, exports and email generation built into the interface.
Still an engineer. Just a different machine.
Engineering taught me to model a system before touching it. That has not changed. Move across the bench to follow the route. Swipe the bench to follow the route.
Mechanical EngineeringBachelor's and Master's at the Universidade de Coimbra, with summers in HVAC and steel structures. Where I learned to model a system before building it.
Coimbra, where I studied and taught. Photos: François Philipp (CC BY 2.0) and Threeohsix (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Experience
Earlier roles
Assistant ProfessorUniversidade de Coimbra2024 to 2025
ResearcherADAI, Coimbra2023 to 2025
Research FellowADAI, Coimbra2023
Metallurgy internMetaloviana, Viana do Castelo2021
Education
PhD, Mechanical EngineeringUniversidade de Coimbra, dropped out2023 to 2025
Master's, Mechanical EngineeringUniversidade de Coimbra2021 to 2023
Bachelor's, Mechanical EngineeringUniversidade de Coimbra2018 to 2022
Let's talk.
Open to a conversation about building products, platforms and the teams behind them.