Rafael Polo

Basel, 4055, Switzerland

rafael@extrapolo.com

linkedin.com/in/rafaelpolo

extrapolo.com

Senior Software Engineer — Platform, Data & AI

Swiss B permit · Portuguese (EU) citizen

20+ years building production systems across Switzerland, Germany, Greece and Brazil. Specialised in platform

engineering, data pipelines and AI/LLM integrations. Fluent English · German B1 TELC (3 yrs Berlin + 3 yrs Basel) · EU

citizen, immediately available.

P R O F E S S I O N A L   E X P E R I E N C E

Swisscom
DevOps Engineer · Zürich, Switzerland

Modernization of mission-critical internal platforms & CI/CD pipelines for high-availability Telecom infrastructure.

EDGE Empower®

Senior Technical Lead · Baar, Switzerland

Mar 2024 – Mar 2025

Feb 2023 – Feb 2024

Built a PayTool cutting processing time by 98%; reduced CI/CD pipeline from 14 → 4 minutes; managed 3 developers and a UX

designer for a SaaS product.

ExtraPolo — Independent Consulting
Software Engineer & Consultant · Rio de Janeiro · Berlin · Athens · Lisbon

2010 – 2022

40+ projects across civic tech, data journalism, open-source platforms and interactive installations for public and private clients. Includes Rodado (~730 Brazilian public datasets, 1TB Parquet, DuckDB, NL-to-SQL over MCP) and HelvetiScan (scanner/mapper of 2.5M+ Swiss .ch domains — HTTP, DNS, TLS, WHOIS, CVE).

Moedax Digital Services

Founder & CTO · Lisbon · Rio de Janeiro

2018 – 2021

Fintech startup connecting CBDC digital currency with KYC compliance automation; built data pipelines and banking integrations in
Python.

GFOSS.eu / Code + Create
Web Programming Teacher · Athens, Greece

2017 – 2018

Taught web programming (HTML, CSS, jQuery) to refugee and local youth through the EU-funded Code + Create initiative.

Tactical Tech Collective
Full-Stack Web Architect · Berlin, Germany

Dec 2014 – Jun 2016

Built investigative data tools and platforms under the Exposing the Invisible team (Ruby on Rails, data visualisation).

Trommsdorff + Drüner

Full-Stack Engineer · Berlin, Germany

Innovation team — Business Intelligence dashboards for marketing consultancy clients.

Cortex Intelligence
Developer · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Competitive Intelligence and Data Mining R&D team.

E D U C A T I O N

L A N G U A G E S

Dec 2013 – Jan 2014

2008 – 2010

Postgraduate in Data Science for Finance
NOVA IMS Information Management School, Lisbon — 2021

Master in Information Systems
PPGI/UNIRIO — Knowledge Representation & Reasoning —
2010–2012

Bachelor in Computer Science
Metodista Bennett, Rio de Janeiro — 2004–2009

Portuguese — native

English — full professional

Spanish — full professional

German B1 — TELC certified · 3 yrs Berlin + 3 yrs Basel

C E R T I F I C A T I O N S

Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP)

Gen AI Foundational Models — NLP & LLMs

AI Agents using RAG and LangChain

T E C H   S K I L L S

Languages & Frameworks · Python · Ruby on Rails ·
TypeScript · React

DevOps & Infra · Docker · Kubernetes · CI/CD · AWS · Linux ·
Git

Data & AI · SQL · ETL · Data Engineering · RAG · LangChain ·
LLM integrations · Data Science

Architecture · REST APIs · MVC · OOP · UML · System Design ·
Web Crawling & Scraping

References available upon request  ·  CV updated May 2026