Guilherme Andrade

Software engineer based in Lisbon, specialising in Erlang and Elixir. I've spent over a decade building distributed backend systems — most recently at Dash Games, before that a decade at Miniclip, and earlier as a sysadmin at RNL, Técnico Lisboa.

Experience

Dash Games — Lead Backend Developer · 2023–2026

Sole engineer behind the studio's game backend — from the real-time game server and player systems to the full GCP infrastructure (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, GCS, Secret Manager, IAP, Workload Identity), all under Terraform IaC and CI/CD. End-to-end ownership across architecture, implementation, deployment and operations.

Miniclip — Senior Software Developer · 2013–2023

A decade building, deploying and operating the server-side systems behind some of Miniclip's biggest titles:

…among others — designing them, shipping them, and keeping them running in production.

The work spanned the full stack of a real-time game backend:

• Real-time game servers — server-authoritative multiplayer for live, latency-critical titles, including C++ game servers for real-time multiplayer at viral scale. Worked across both major networking models: continuous real-time state, and client-side deterministic physics for turn-based titles.
• Game networking — Protocol Buffers over TCP/WebSockets as the default transport, dropping to UDP for latency-sensitive titles, including a C++ game-networking library wrapped in an idiomatic Erlang NIF with a custom binary protocol.
• High-concurrency load management — worker pools, rate limiting and fair resource allocation under massive, spiky traffic.
• Multi-cloud infrastructure — roughly a decade running game backends on AWS at scale (compute, autoscaling, load balancing, managed data stores, queues, CDN, infrastructure-as-code). Built demand-driven autoscaling against cloud-provider APIs — programmatically launching and tearing down capacity to track traffic peaks — across AWS, Linode and DigitalOcean.
• Edge security under live attack — automated Cloudflare to shield on-demand game servers from DDoS, and built an anti-cheat reputation system with trust scoring and graduated reCAPTCHA challenges that withstood a large-scale botnet attack shortly after launch.
• Observability & operations — production monitoring, alerting and on-call, with CI/CD pipelines deploying automatically to production.
• Runtime-level performance — native code (NIFs) where the BEAM needed a push, plus fixes contributed back upstream into Erlang/OTP itself

RNL — Técnico Lisboa · Systems Administrator · 2010–2012

Ran the university's student-run computing facilities as part of a six-person team — the student computer labs (the bulk of the fleet) plus the servers and network behind them, mostly Linux with some Windows/Active Directory.

Open source

A selection of libraries I maintain, mostly for the BEAM ecosystem — 19 packages on Hex, 16M+ total downloads:

Recent — xb5: B-tree (order 5) data structures for Erlang/OTP — drop-in gb_trees/gb_sets alternatives that run 1.2–2.5× faster with equal or lower heap use, plus an order-statistic multiset (rank, nth element, percentile). Ships with an idiomatic Elixir wrapper.

Recent — ex_fpe: Format-preserving encryption for Elixir — a pure-Elixir implementation of the NIST SP 800-38G modes FF1 and FF3-1, extending my Erlang erlffx to Elixir.

→ full list

Upstream contributions

erlang/otp

• ets:select_replace/2 — matchspec-based row replacement in ETS tables
• math:fmod/2 — floating-point modulo BIF
• enif_hash — hashing arbitrary terms from NIF code
• Cryptographically strong random number generation via rand plugin
• zlib inflation dictionary extraction
• Various fixes and documentation improvements

Erlang/Elixir ecosystem

rebar3 rebar3_hex rebar3_hank ex_doc exile hackney certifi others

Technologies

Languages — Erlang, Elixir, SQL, C++; some C, JavaScript, Python, Rust over the years

Runtime / frameworks — OTP, Cowboy, Phoenix (LiveView), Ecto, Protocol Buffers

Infrastructure — GCP and AWS; Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker; demand-driven autoscaling via cloud-provider APIs

Data — PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis

Observability & CI/CD — Datadog, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty; GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CodeDeploy

Systems — Linux as a daily driver since the mid-2000s; shell scripting, comfortable live-debugging production issues

Experiments

Small interactive toys — audio illusions, optics, generative graphics:

Talks

erlchronos — a gen_server wrapper with ticks (Erlang User Conference 2016)

Contact

website@gandrade.net LinkedIn GitHub