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Senior Data Scientist · AI Engineer

João
Barroca

I build agentic systems that remember and keep working for days — on a schedule, not a prompt.

◷ Portugal · Remote ▦ Python · GenAI & NLP ↳ PT / EN
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01About

I'm a Senior Data Scientist at OLX, with a growing identity as an AI Engineer.

I have a T-shaped background spanning Data Science, Machine Learning, and Software Engineering — broad enough to move across the stack, deep enough to build production-ready AI systems that are observable and scalable.

Off the clock, I build for my own house — home automation, CLIs, and the occasional robot.

If you're working on agentic systems, or just want to geek out about AI architecture, let's connect.

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02Experience

OLX

2023 — now

Senior Data Scientist · Remote

GenAI for Services — partnering with customer units to prototype and ship generative-AI products that drive business value.

Built and shipped a live CV Optimizer Agent that helps users strengthen their CVs, with hallucination safeguards built in.

Building a foundational agentic-commerce harness on a small set of primitives — MCPs, hooks, skills, and agentic memory.

And a foundational personalization layer that uses LLMs to turn structured and unstructured user data into rich semantic profiles.

Previously on Search & Discovery — learning-to-rank, query understanding, and hybrid search.

Farfetch

2019 — 2023

Junior → Senior Data Scientist · Lisbon

Four years across Search and the Fashion Knowledge System: query understanding (NER & entity linking), search relevance, knowledge graphs, entity resolution, active learning, and visual-language modelling.

Grew from Junior to Senior, scaling NLP and information-extraction systems into production.

ISR — Institute for Systems & Robotics

2019

SocRob@Home — Researcher · Lisbon

Built a spoken goal-oriented dialogue system for a service robot — natural-language understanding, dialogue state tracking, and dialogue management on a ROS stack.

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03Side projects

Open source · Go

hactl ↗

A fast, single-binary CLI for Home Assistant — built for scripting, AI agents, and developers who'd rather type than click.

Personal · Agentic

Jarvis

A personal AI assistant with sandboxed skill execution, full observability, and Home Assistant control through hactl.

Autonomy · UAVs

Argus

Going back to an old passion — working toward drones that patrol and monitor an area on their own, handling their own perception and navigation.

Research · VLAs

Robotics foundation models

Experimenting with vision-language-action (VLA) models — the new wave of foundation models that map perception and natural-language goals straight to robot control.

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04Capabilities

GenAI & agents

  • Agentic systems & LLM workflows
  • RAG & semantic retrieval
  • Model serving & fine-tuning

ML & NLP

  • Information extraction & search
  • Knowledge graphs & entity resolution
  • Deep learning

Data & platform

  • Python & production engineering
  • Distributed data & pipelines
  • Observability & scalability
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05Education

Instituto Superior Técnico, U. Lisboa
BSc & MSc, Aerospace Engineering — major in Avionics, minor in Control & Systems
2012 — 2019
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06Contact

Building something agentic? Let's talk.

↗ GitHub ↗ LinkedIn