I’m Ricardo Torres. I live in Amsterdam, where I lead engineering teams and build software.

I was born in Salvador, Brazil 🇧🇷, and I’ve been making things on computers for as long as I can remember. I picked up HTML and PHP as a teenager, co-founded a small web agency in my early twenties, and slowly fell into the kind of work I still love most: figuring out what to build, building it, and then keeping it running for real people.

In 2014 I moved from Brazil to the Netherlands. A year later, while waiting for my girlfriend to join me, we wanted a way for our families back home to be part of building our new home in Amsterdam. So I created a small website where friends could “buy” virtual gifts and we’d use the money to set up our flat. That side project became Chá Online, a Brazilian SaaS for online gift registries, focused on baby showers and housewarmings. More than ten years later, it’s still running, and it has helped more than 145k families do their own version of the same thing.

Professionally I’ve grown from webdesigner to webmaster, to front-end developer, to backend engineer to principal engineer, and most recently into engineering management. Today I lead an engineering team at New10, a Dutch fintech, where I work on shared business and platform capabilities, AI adoption, API access management, and cost-efficiency. Earlier I helped build New10’s serverless foundation, scaled it from a handful of Lambdas to hundreds, led architecture and engineering enablement as a Principal Engineer, and worked at mycujoo (football live streaming) and comScore (media analytics) before that.

I care about pragmatic engineering, clear communication, coaching, and shipping software that earns its keep. Outside of work I’m a husband and a dad, and Chá Online is my long-running side school for product, payments, support, and the day-to-day realities of running software with real users.