André Ávila

About

I am a Software Development Engineer enthusiastic about facing new challenges and improving my capabilities. I am always excited to try things and to have fun overcoming obstacles. Some of my main areas of interest are Distributed Systems and Software Development.

Experience

1. Software Development Engineer, Central Reliability & Response Engineering

   Aug 2025 - Present

   Amazon, Dublin, Ireland

   • Implemented 90+ rollback monitors across 20 production pipelines using aggregated service status and SLI based alarms, increasing release safety, and reducing MTTR.
   • Resolved 279 of 450 security risks in 9 days using GenAI tools and manual effort, lowering the team’s open risk count by 62%.

2. Computer Graphics Teaching Assistant

   Feb 2025 - Jun 2025

   University of Porto, Oporto, Portugal

   • Assisted the professor in preparing class materials and advised students during project development.
   • Monitored student progress, ensuring the correct understanding of the studied concepts.

3. Estagiar U Internship

   Aug 2023 & Jul 2024

   AJAT, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal

   • Automated the monthly animal data entry and helped organise the performance calculation, saving 18+ minutes per partner for 30+ partners (9+ hours of manual effort reduced per month).
   • Independently designed and developed a locally hosted web platform, automating AJAT's previously manual partner information management and billing processes.
   • Both solutions remain in active use today.

4. Curricular Internship

   Feb 2023 - Jun 2023

   DevScope, Oporto, Portugal

   • Engineered a speaker recognition as a service prototype achieving 89% accuracy under test conditions.
   • Authored a detailed report documenting the system design, methodology and results.

Projects

1. Discrete Event Simulator

   May 2025 - Jun 2025

   • Built a discrete-event simulator as part of my dissertation titled "Evaluation of Distributed Statistical Learning", enabling reproducible experiments with configurable randomness and built-in logging.
   • Validated the simulator by reproducing results of an existing distributed generalised linear model, identified functional shortcomings, and proposed improvements tested using the simulator.
   • Reduced the need for costly physical experiments, accelerating evaluation and analysis of distributed algorithms while providing quantitative insights into correctness, efficiency, and fault tolerance.

   • Rust
   • Distributed Systems
   • Networking
   • Federated Learning

2. Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Key-Value Store

   Sep 2024 - Dec 2024

   • Built a proof-of-concept Byzantine fault-tolerant key-value store at DARE 2024, applying distributed systems concepts from Professor Martin Kleppmann's lecture.
   • Developed a demonstration app to showcase the project's functionalities to the researchers present at the event.
   • Presented and defended the feasibility of the solution to active researchers in the field.

   • Golang
   • Deno
   • Distributed Systems
   • Networking

3. NetKing

   Feb 2024 - Jun 2024

   • A network orchestration and management visual interface for Docker Compose.
   • Developed for the Networks and Systems Management course.

   • Tauri
   • TypeScript
   • Docker
   • Rust
   • Networking

4. Time Table Selector

   Jun 2022 - Jan 2023

   • Proposed and implemented an improvement in the user experience by enabling a preview of the options, resulting in a less time-consuming way of visualising possible schedule options.

   • React
   • Django
   • MongoDB
   • Tailwind CSS
   • Docker
   • Web Development

5. New Website NIAEFEUP (Not Available Yet)

   Oct 2023 - Jun 2025

   • Integrated the backend and frontend development teams for the Informatics Division for the Students' Union at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto's website

   • Spring Boot
   • Kotlin
   • SvelteKit
   • Tailwind CSS
   • TypeScript

Books

Some of the tech related books I've read.

2025

• The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols, and Chris Krycho, with contributions from the Rust Community
• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts by Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage, Zhamak Dehghani
• System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide (Volume 1) by Alex Xu
• Learning GitHub Actions by Brent Laster

2024

• Learning DevSecOps by Steve Suehring
• Web Application Security, 2nd Edition by Andrew Hoffman
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

This website was created using Astro and Tailwind CSS. The information is managed through a TOML file which is also used to generate the resume using Typst. Inspired in Britanny Chiang's website.