Hi, I’m Lucas. I’m Brazilian, and I live on the Costa del Sol in Spain, close to the sea.

I got my first computer when I was 8, a gift from my parents and my grandmother. I mostly played games on it: Tibia, Counter-Strike 1.6, Warcraft and Dota.

Later I studied mechatronics and did a technical course in telecommunications. I liked the electronics and the programming a lot more than the mechanical part, so I went on to study Computer Science at the Instituto Federal Catarinense. That’s where I got into Linux, and where I met Fernanda, my partner. My first job was at Senior Sistemas, a large Brazilian ERP company, writing Java and C.

I moved to infrastructure at T-Systems, working on the Telekom Cloud and on HPC (high-performance computing) clusters that ran fluid dynamics and aerodynamics simulations for companies like Volkswagen. I learned most of my Linux, Python, Ansible, Terraform and Kubernetes there, on the job, and I’ve worked in DevOps, SRE and platform engineering ever since.

At some point I also tried making games, and found out I didn’t enjoy it, mostly because I didn’t like making the assets. What I liked, as a kid and now, is figuring out how things work and going deeper until I understand the whole system. Infrastructure and hardware give me a lot of that.

Today I’m a Senior Platform Engineer, DevOps & SRE, with 8+ years of experience, working remotely with teams around the world. Some things I’m proud of:

  • Tech Lead of a 12-engineer SRE group running a platform with 5,000+ pods
  • Led the move of 80 repos from Terraform Cloud to Atlantis, cutting about $70k a year in costs
  • Led the platform through Black Fridays with zero incidents

As a Tech Lead, the part I cared about most was the people: mentoring them and the culture of the team.

I also contribute to open source, mainly OpenTofu and tofu-ls, and I write about what I learn on this blog.

Away from the computer I’m usually with Fernanda, walking on the beach, hiking, or having a glass of wine. Some of my hikes are on Wikiloc.

If you want to talk about infrastructure, open source or work, email me at lucasgrvarela@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn.