João Costa
Staff Software Engineer at Kevel
Braga, Portugal
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoão Costa is a Staff Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building scalable systems across ad tech and e-commerce, currently driving engineering at Kevel after senior roles at Zalando and Velocidi. He holds a master’s in Informatics and Computing from the University of Porto and blends expertise in distributed/parallel computing, AI, and computer graphics to tackle problems in big data, machine learning, and computer vision. A full‑stack contributor to notable open-source projects like Polynote, he has shipped backend Scala improvements and refined frontend plotting UI components, demonstrating comfort across languages and layers. João is a competitive coder and lifelong learner—regularly entering game jams and online courses—which fuels his pragmatic yet experimental approach to engineering. Based in Braga, Portugal, he brings both production-grade delivery and a research-minded curiosity to complex system design. An underrated strength is his track record of improving dependency management and developer experience in the projects he touches.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master Informatics and Computing Engineering, Master Informatics and Computing Engineering at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do PortoEscola 3/Secundária de Vila Verde
Github Skills (9)
notebook10
front-end-development10
scala10
typescript-types9
vega9
typescript9
typescripts9
javascript8
dependency-management8
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
polynote/polynote
Oct 2019 - Apr 2021
A better notebook for Scala (and more)
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 review, 28 commits, 13 PRs in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:João contributed to both the frontend and backend aspects of the Polynote project. They addressed issues related to data type handling and aggregation in Scala code within the backend. On the frontend, they implemented and refactored UI components, including the plot editor, and addressed issues related to plotting functionality and user interactions. Furthermore, the user improved the project's dependency management and configuration.
scalanotebook
JD557/interim
Jun 2023 - Feb 2026
Immediate mode GUI in pure Scala
Contributions:6 releases, 212 PRs, 219 pushes in 2 years 8 months
immediate-modescalaguiimmediate-guiscala-js
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