Hi, I'm

Francisco Polaco Santos.

Engineer at heart, leading with purpose.

Engineering Manager @ Human Ready

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About Me

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I’m an engineer turned engineering manager, currently leading teams at Human Ready. I’ve spent my career building software and the people around it — I care as much about how teams work as about the code they ship.

(More about my journey coming soon.)


Values & Philosophy

(Coming soon — what I believe about engineering, leadership, and people.)

Experience

Engineering Manager - Human Ready
Apr 2024 - Present
Leading the product engineering team and project teams.
Senior Software Engineer
Apr 2022 - Mar 2024
Built highly scalable analytics products working closely with product and engineering. Stack: FastAPI, React, Docker. First steps leading technical projects and mentoring junior engineers.
Software Engineer - Feedzai
Oct 2018 - Mar 2022
Worked on Feedzai Genome (link analysis for financial crime detection) and Case Manager (transaction alert management). Led key parts of a major Genome redesign. Completed a CS rotation as a delivery engineer, gaining direct client-facing exposure.

Education

2016 - 2018
Master's Degree, Computer Science and Engineering
Instituto Superior Técnico
GPA: 16 / 20
Focused on Distributed Systems and Cybersecurity. Thesis: PRIME — a probabilistic membership protocol for large-scale systems.
2013 - 2016
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Engineering
Instituto Superior Técnico
GPA: 16 / 20
Core curriculum: Computer Networks, Distributed Systems, Software Engineering, AI, Compilers, Databases.

Things I've built

Markdown TTS Reader
Reads markdown notes aloud. Built because I needed a way to go through notes hands-free in the car — no existing tool did exactly this.
Compound Interest Calculator
A compound interest calculator with all the fields you actually need. Most calculators were missing something, so I prompted a better one.