Nadia Costa

Resume / CV

Nadia Costa

Senior Software Engineer

Lisbon, Portugal Open to remote she/her

nadia@nadiacosta.dev LinkedIn GitHub nadiacosta.dev

Summary

Engineer focused on operational simplicity, observability, and the messy hand-off between research code and production. Built and led teams from 3 to 12 people. Currently looking for a senior or staff role on a backend or platform team that values long-term maintainability over feature velocity.

Experience

  1. Staff Software Engineer · Mira Financial

    2023 — Present

    Remote · Lisbon-based

    • Led the migration of three core ledger services to Kubernetes; cut p99 reconciliation latency from 4.2s to 1.6s without changing the underlying algorithms.
    • Designed and shipped the audit-log pipeline now used across all 14 product teams; survived two regulatory audits with zero deficiencies.
    • Mentored four engineers from mid to senior level, two of whom now lead their own platform teams.

  2. Senior Software Engineer · Cadence Systems

    2020 — 2023

    London, UK

    • Built the multi-tenant feature-flag service that now ships every change at Cadence (~140 deploys/week).
    • Drove a quarterly observability review program; reduced MTTR on customer-facing incidents from 28 min median to 9 min.
    • Wrote the internal SLO playbook, adopted by 11 of 14 product teams within 6 months.

  3. Founding Engineer · Volta Labs

    2018 — 2020

    Lisbon, Portugal

    • Employee #2; built the v1 backend (Go + Postgres + Kafka), CI/CD pipeline, and on-call rotation policies.
    • Shipped the API that won Volta its first three enterprise customers (combined ARR > €1.2M at exit).
    • Helped recruit and onboard the first 6 engineering hires.

  4. Software Engineer · Tarefa.io

    2016 — 2018

    Porto, Portugal

    • Joined as the company's 4th engineer. Owned the billing subsystem from architecture through Stripe integration.
    • Replaced a brittle cron-based scheduler with a queue + worker design that's still in production seven years later.

Selected Projects

  • queueview

    github.com/allanninal

    A small, opinionated TUI for inspecting RabbitMQ queues from the terminal. ~1.2K stars on GitHub.

    • Go
    • tview
    • AMQP 0.9.1

  • slo-helper

    github.com/allanninal

    A Prometheus rule generator that turns a YAML SLO definition into the alerts and dashboards you actually need.

    • Python
    • Prometheus
    • Grafana

  • ledger-sim

    github.com/allanninal

    A double-entry ledger simulator built for engineering interview prep workshops. Used by 3 fintech bootcamps.

    • TypeScript
    • PostgreSQL

  • audit-log-spec

    github.com/allanninal

    A working RFC-style spec for tamper-evident audit logs in Postgres. Co-authored with two former Mira colleagues.

    • PostgreSQL
    • Specification

Education

  1. MSc, Computer Science · Universidade de Lisboa

    2014 — 2016

    Thesis: "Snapshot Isolation Trade-offs in Distributed Ledgers." Advised by Prof. R. Almeida.

  2. BSc, Computer Engineering · Universidade de Coimbra

    2010 — 2014

    Final project on causal consistency in geo-distributed databases.