I’m Thiago Alves. Software engineer and engineering lead.

I come from a small town in the south of Brazil. Being a software engineer never crossed my mind — programming wasn’t on the list of things I knew existed. A technical IT course introduced us, and I’ve been at it ever since.

I joined the software industry in 2011. Websites, small apps, a lot of different technologies, and people around me with far more experience than I had. It was the stretch where I learned the most, and all of it came from building real things.

As the projects got bigger and more complicated, I got more interested in how software gets built well. Better practices, testing, code review, cloud infrastructure, the methodologies modern teams run on. That interest is what moved me into leadership, and I’ve been a tech lead in one form or another ever since.

In 2023 I came to the US to work on my English. My wife and our two cats came with me. What started as temporary turned into a green card application, and it helped me get to another level in my career.

Currently I’m based in Austin, Texas. Besides work, my time goes to my wife, our cats, friends, a lot of Brazilian barbecue, and the sports I follow more closely than I should.