Product Designer & Frontend Engineer
I design interfaces and build the code behind them. Before that, I was drawing buildings — and before that, keeping IBM's systems alive in Brazil. The common thread is making complex things feel obvious to the people who use them.
Some of these are products. Some are buildings. All of them had a real person at the end of the decisions.
My first end-to-end UX project. A mobile app that matches Lisbon coffee lovers to specialty cafés based on taste profile — without requiring them to know any coffee jargon. Research, personas, prototypes, usability testing. Google UX Certificate project.
I built this because I kept watching architects calculate embodied carbon in Excel. Upload a building plan, get a full LCA carbon report and BREEAM score — Claude reads the PDF, I built everything else. Next.js, TypeScript, Anthropic API. Three studios paying for it.
Designed and built the full digital presence for a Lisbon architectural studio. Visual identity, UX, and the production site. Still live at policronica.com.
Sustainable hotel on the Portuguese coast. Led the design from concept to technical drawings — passive energy systems, eco materials, regenerative tourism. Four years of real construction.
Theatrical dining installation inside an 18th-century Lisbon palace. Built the space, designed the experience, won the UNESCO Versailles Prize 2023. One of the stranger things I've made.
Buildings taught me that design doesn't end at the screen. Someone lives inside what you make.
I started at IBM in Brazil running enterprise operations. Then architecture school — Brazil, Kansas, New York. Then construction sites in Lisbon. Then a developer bootcamp because the tools architects were using were embarrassingly bad. Then code, every day since.
I'm not making a transition. I'm accumulating. The architecture trained me to think in systems and constraints. The construction sites taught me that design that can't be built is decoration. The code gave me the speed to iterate on both.
Right now I'm splitting time between a construction site in Sintra and a laptop building ArchAI. Most mornings start with concrete. Most nights end with TypeScript.
I'm looking for roles where design and engineering overlap — Product Designer, UX Engineer, Frontend Developer. Teams that care about what they build and why.
Remote-friendly. Based in Lisbon. Can be on a plane with a few days' notice.
Leading design and construction of a 100% energy-efficient sustainable hotel. Managing teams, suppliers, and stakeholder relationships while building ArchAI on the side.
Java, C#, PL/SQL. Built data visualisation tools with MicroStrategy. First exposure to enterprise software at scale.
Built a gRPC API in Go, Docker deployments, structured UI. First professional software role — learned that shipping beats planning.
React, Python, APIs. The moment I stopped being an architect who could code and started being a developer who understood architecture.
Architecture, construction, web design. Built policronica.com. UNESCO Versailles Prize 2023.
Residential and commercial projects in Manhattan. First time I understood what it means to design for a specific city.
Systems monitoring, global coordination, enterprise operations. The foundation. Everything else makes more sense because of this.
Open to Product Designer, UX Engineer, and Frontend Developer roles. Remote-friendly. I work well with small teams who care about craft.
fernando.ffsousa@gmail.comNo pitch, no pressure. Just a chat about what you're building and whether I can help.
Book a call ↗