Summary
David Vaz is a Senior Backend Developer specializing in Python and Django with 13 years of multidisciplinary experience spanning academia, startups, and product engineering. He holds a PhD in Spatial Data Mining and moved from research and university lecturing into hands-on software roles, preferring deep developer work over long-term management. A serial founder and co-founder (AdEvolutio, Geolink) with proven commercial impact, he has led architecture, infrastructure and data-driven applications while growing teams and delivering public-sector and enterprise systems. David is a community builder — founding PyCon Portugal and co-organizing multiple editions of DjangoCon Europe, including the first virtual and record-attendance hybrid events — which reflects his commitment to open source and developer ecosystems. Based in Porto, he combines rigorous research instincts with pragmatic product delivery, often resurfacing academic techniques into production-grade backends and data pipelines.
13 years of coding experience