About
Ricardo Lopes
Director of Engineering at Doutor Finanças. Fifteen years close to money moving — payments, platforms, and the teams behind them.
I have spent most of my career near payments. I joined Easypay as a developer, left for Berlin to lead engineering at Rocket Labs, and came back to Easypay as CTO. Since 2021 I have led engineering at Doutor Finanças, where the product is helping people get their finances in order. Fintech teaches you quickly that correctness is not a feature you add later.
What I do now is less about writing code than it used to be: the shape of a system, the boundaries between its parts, and whether the team can still reason about it in a year. My bias is towards fewer moving pieces, explicit contracts, and code that tells you when you have broken it.
The code I write for myself is Go. I like it for the same reason I like deterministic simulations — it is small enough to hold in your head, and it makes the expensive decisions visible instead of hiding them behind convenience.
Now
- Leading engineering and interoperability at Doutor Finanças.
- Building Caravel — rival AI, multiplayer over a lockstep seam, and the art pass.
- Running all of it on one small machine, on purpose.
Working history
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Doutor Finanças
Engineering and interoperability across the products and the platform.
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Easypay
Technology for a licensed payment institution: integrations, platform, and the team that ran them.
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Rocket Labs
Lead at datajet.io, and before that at SellerCenter Express.
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SAPO
MeoWallet, in PHP, Python and Java.
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Easypay
Payment integrations, and running a small technical team. I came back five years later to lead it.
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Teamsoft
Where it started: an internship that turned into custom work in PHP, Java and MySQL.