{ Gabriel Fontes }

Curriculum Vitae

Last updated: 2026-07-02

Overview

Software engineer and researcher focused on reproducible infrastructure, developer tooling, cloud deployment workflows, and free/open-source software. My work is mostly around development processes, build systems, infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, and backend.

I currently work full-time at Magalu Cloud, where I work on underlying cloud resources, virtualization, packaging, and deployment orchestration. I am also pursuing a Computer Science M.Sc. at the University of São Paulo, researching software sustainability in open-source ecosystems.

I frequently work with Rust, Python, Lua, PostgreSQL, Nix/NixOS, Docker, Terraform, Linux, Juju, and GitHub Actions. I also have experience with UI/UX and web/graphic design.

Outside of work, I contribute to free/open-source software, help coordinate GELOS, and enjoy teaching what I know to others.

Selected public technical artifacts

Industry experience

Magalu Cloud (2024-present)

Magazine Luiza is a leading retail company group in Brazil. Magalu Cloud, an innovative project under the company’s wing, is Brazil’s first 100% domestic public cloud platform.

Software Engineer (2025-present)

I am currently part of the team managing underlying resources. That includes working with open-source solutions for virtualization (including OpenStack and Incus), packaging, and deployment automation (mainly Canonical Juju and Ansible).

Site Reliability Engineer (2024-2025)

I was part of the team working on the platform’s Object Storage solution. My responsibilities as an SRE included deployment automation, automated testing, monitoring, and coordinating routine processes (deployments, disk replacements, etc.).

Zoocha (2023-2024)

Zoocha is a digital agency, especially focused on Drupal development. Zoocha’s clients include government, universities, and private companies.

DevOps Engineer (2023-2024)

As part of the DevOps team, I mainly tackled technical debt and supported developers with better tooling and practices, while simultaneously taking care of cloud operations and making sure everything was running smoothly.

Some of the work included improving developer tooling, migrating (Chef-based) client infrastructure from AWS OpsWorks into Terraform-managed AWS SSM, and dealing with day-to-day operations.

U-Get (2020-2023)

U-Get was a startup that pioneered a computer vision-based vending machine system. The system is able to recognize and bill customers based on what they pick up from a vending spot (fridge, locker), being much cheaper than traditional mechanical machines.

Our team built our systems from the ground up - including mobile apps, fleet management (MDM) and billing systems; leveraging Cloud of Things technologies.

DevOps Engineer (2020-2023)

I worked with AWS, Terraform, containers, CI/CD, deployments, databases, and multi-tenant environments.

I led the migration from fragile manual deployments and partially configured Kubernetes infrastructure into reproducible AWS-based infrastructure using Terraform, ECS, ECR, IAM, and S3. This included reorganizing and decoupling application components, introducing CI/CD pipelines, and supporting safer blue-green deployments with short feedback loops.

I also helped shift the engineering culture toward code review, shared ownership, and safer production changes. I mentored peers and senior stakeholders on Git, Linux, infrastructure practices, and code review, helping replace direct production changes with review-gated workflows.

Freelance Developer (2020-2020)

I started off at U-Get by creating a management solution for a fleet of Android tablets. The MVP was a Python CLI (later rewritten into a Rust backend) that handled the entire lifecycle of our tablets.

EVAG

EVAG is a digital agency, focusing on WordPress and custom solutions for different clients, mostly politicians and activists.

Communication Intern (2020)

A temporary job during Brazilian 2020 municipal elections, I built campaign websites for multiple candidates, many of them now elected. The job involved working closely together with the candidates, and making their requirements into actual websites in a very short timespan.

Education and Research

For my publications, see: Publications.

University of Groningen (2025)

University of Groningen (RUG) is one of the leading universities in the Netherlands.

Research Internship (2025)

I was at RUG for a 3 month internship, focusing on the intersection between Cloud Computing Sustainability and open-source software tooling. Some of this research was published at SESoS ‘26.

University of São Paulo (2020-present)

University of São Paulo (USP) is considered to be Brazil’s most prestigious university, and frequently the top university in Latin America.

During my time here, I helped create and currently lead our Open-Source & Free Software extracurricular group.

Master’s: Computer Science and Computational Mathematics (2023-present)

I’m currently researching Software Sustainability in open-source software projects, hoping to contribute to our understanding of best practices for successful, long-lived, self-sustaining OSS. Some of this research was published at Designing ‘26.

Bachelor’s: Computer Information Systems (2020-2022)

I studied different areas in computing, especially software engineering, software testing, databases, and operating systems.

I was a teaching assistant for a semester, on a Database Practice subject.

Open-source and Community

GELOS - Leadership

I co-founded and help lead GELOS, a free/open-source software group at ICMC-USP. I coordinate, mentor, review work, and help resolve conflicts for a group of roughly 10-20 members, and have mentored many more contributors over the years.

I implemented and maintain much of our infrastructure and development process, including our website, NixOS-based hosts, GitHub monorepo, CI/CD workflows, merge queues, CODEOWNERS-based review, and contribution practices.

Together with UFSCar’s Patos, we maintain a large Brazilian free software package mirrors.

Nix ecosystem - Contributor

Nix is a build and deployment tool based on functional programming concepts, such as immutability. It allows for highly reproducible packaging, as well as fully declarative Linux systems through NixOS.

I’m a very active member in the community. Besides contributing with packages and modules in nixpkgs and home-manager, I’ve also created a couple relatively popular projects for the ecosystem:

Other contributions

As I prefer to use open source tools, I frequently hack on them to add a feature I want or fix a bug; usually upstream the results as PRs. Thanks to this, I know my way around codebases written in different languages.