Carlos P. Muniz
Braga, Portugal · Available for new roles

Engineering leadership for multidisciplinary product teams.

I am a technically credible Engineering Manager with twenty-five years in software and the last six dedicated to leading mobile and backend teams across telecom, banking, and digital health.

25+
years in software engineering
18+
engineers led at peak
5
countries of professional reach
14+
years teaching and mentoring
About

A leader engineers route hard problems to, not around.

For the last six years I have led distributed product teams of iOS, Android, and backend engineers — the kind of multidisciplinary squad that is rare in the Portuguese market. I am close enough to architecture and design to be a thought partner for senior engineers, but I am no longer hands-on in production code. I have made peace with that, and I lead better for it.

My focus is where I add the most value: hiring and growing engineers, setting technical direction in partnership with seniors, owning delivery cadence, and being the steady point of escalation when systems or stakeholders get loud.

I work best in regulated, high-stakes domains — tier-1 telecom, banking, digital health, government audit — where the cost of getting it wrong is real and the people building it have to be both careful and fast.

Method

How I lead.

Six principles that describe how I actually work day-to-day, distilled from twenty-five years and the kind of feedback that lands when colleagues are honest with you.

01

Multidisciplinary by default

I have run squads with iOS, Android, and backend engineers in the same team. Comfortable navigating cross-platform trade-offs and being a credible counterpart to seniors in any of those disciplines — without claiming to be the deepest in the room.

02

Technical direction, not hands-on coding

Architecture and integration discussions, design reviews, and high-stakes technical trade-offs. I keep up with the stack enough to ask the right questions and push back when it matters.

03

People development

Direct, honest 1:1s that develop engineers rather than log status. Coached two engineers into tech-lead roles. Hire with a high bar; willing to leave a seat empty rather than fill it badly.

04

Delivery and operational rigour

Weekly cadence, predictable releases, KPI and SLA discipline with enterprise clients. Comfortable in regulated environments where the cost of getting it wrong is real.

05

Domain breadth

Have led teams through legacy-to-cloud-native modernisation, digital-safety SaaS at carrier scale, banking integrations under audit, and government systems with zero-downtime tolerance.

06

AI fluency for leaders

Daily user of Claude, Cursor, and Copilot for the leadership work itself — reviewing designs, drafting docs, preparing 1:1s, sense-checking technical proposals. AI as a multiplier for the team, not a gimmick.

In other people's words

What colleagues, peers and students have said.

"

Carlos is a rare find in engineering management: a leader with genuine integrity and backbone. He is both a strategic thinker and a fierce advocate for his team. His greatest strength is his ability to confront challenges directly, using factual arguments to navigate high-level discussions and ensure his team's efforts are duly recognised. He leads by example and stands his ground when it matters most. If you are looking for a leader who truly empowers an engineering organisation, look no further.

Pedro Rosas
Staff Engineer · Smith Micro Software, Inc.
March 2026
"

I knew Carlos at the OutSystems Low-Code School in Braga, and from the early beginning he was a very proactive attendant, always asking questions and clarifying everything being taught on the OutSystems Platform. Afterwards, he successfully obtained his Associate Web Development certification on OutSystems 11. I am sure he will succeed on adopting the OutSystems Platform in his professional career.

Paulo Moreira
OutSystems Practice Tech Leader · Inetum
November 2019
"

Carlos is one of those rare professors who also naturally serves as an inspiring mentor for the whole class. I had the pleasure to be his student for two years in classes like Java and C# .NET. I was particularly impressed with his ability to detect students' shortcomings and use them to his advantage to better teach his students. Showing great mastery over the subjects and how to run a class. Carlos would be a great addition to any company or faculty.

João Gabriel Miranda
Technical Lead · Constellation Automotive Group Tech Hub
June 2018
"

Carlos Pedro is an excellent professional. I could check his competence and commitment under different approaches: as his teammate he revealed a great working partnership, and currently as his boss, it is with great satisfaction that I recommend him. Outstanding proficiency in C# and MVC, combined with his enthusiasm about teamwork, are qualities that make him a distinguished professional, revealing a great hiring for any company.

Lúcio Camilo
VP of Technology and Digital · CAIXA
January 2018
Trajectory

A career across regulated domains.

Nov 2025 — Mar 2026

Engineering Manager / Value Flow Owner

Nox Health · Porto, Portugal (Hybrid)

Leading engineering execution for a value stream inside a digital health SaaS platform serving the US and Canada — a regulated, high-availability environment with strict patient-data and compliance constraints.

Partnering with Product and Engineering Leadership to surface priorities, sequence work, and remove blockers. Running weekly cadence and 1:1s across multiple disciplines.

Jan 2020 — Nov 2025

Director of Engineering · Software Engineering Manager

Smith Micro Software, Inc. · Braga, Portugal (Remote, distributed team)

Led engineering for SafePath, a digital safety and family-protection SaaS deployed to tier-1 telecom operators (T-Mobile in the US, Telus in Canada), serving hundreds of thousands of end-users across iOS, Android, and backend services.

Managed cross-functional product teams totalling 18+ engineers across mobile and backend, distributed across Portugal, the US, and Latin America. Owned delivery cadence, KPI and SLA reporting, and resolution of P1/P2 escalations with telecom carriers.

Coached senior engineers (two promoted into tech-lead roles); partnered with recruiting; reduced release cycles from 4 months to 1.5 months through CI/CD adoption and pragmatic process changes.

Oct 2018 — Dec 2019

Software Architect / Tech Lead

ITSector · Braga, Portugal

Led an 8-engineer team designing and delivering REST APIs and financial integrations for top-tier Portuguese banks — SIBS, Millennium bcp, Montepio — under banking-grade security and availability requirements.

Apr 2008 — Mar 2018

Software Architect · Project Manager · Senior Developer

Tribunal de Contas RJ · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Architected mission-critical government auditing platforms with zero-downtime tolerance and audit-grade compliance. Led the Liferay institutional portal upgrade and managed vendor and internal teams across .NET and Java initiatives.

1999 — 2008

Earlier roles

InstantASP (UK) · GoTec · Odebrecht · London, Rio de Janeiro

.NET engineering for global clients in London; SAP/EDI integrations (EDIFACT, X12) for enterprise systems; .NET engineering for the Odebrecht consortium.

Foundations

Education, certifications and teaching.

Education

Doctoral studies in Informatics (AI & LLMs)
Universidade do Minho, Portugal · 2025, paused — intending to resume
M.Sc. in Computing and Systems
Instituto Militar de Engenharia (IME), Brazil
B.Sc. in Information Systems
Universidade Veiga de Almeida, Brazil

Certifications

Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Kanban Management Professional (KMP)
Management 3.0 Facilitator
OutSystems Associate Web Developer (v11)

Teaching & mentoring

Tokio School Portugal — Instructor & Mentor
Spring Boot / Java curriculum and 1:1 mentorship · 2025–2026
4Geeks Academy — Senior Mentor
JavaScript, Node.js, and React · 2023–2024
Instituto Infnet — University Professor
.NET Architecture, undergraduate and graduate programs · 2011–2016

Technical context

Backend & platform
Java, Spring Boot, .NET (C#) and .NET Core, REST APIs, event-driven and microservices, AWS, Azure, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CI/CD pipelines
Mobile (at leadership level)
iOS and Android — led teams, not hands-on
Infrastructure
Kubernetes and Docker — familiar as a leader of teams operating those workloads