ABOUT ME
Hi, I am Rita! A Software Engineer based in Évora, Portugal.
As a freelancer, I work with small and medium companies to sharpen their digital experience: build websites that create a strong first impression, understand what is working for them or not, and turn their raw data into clear, game-changing insights.
My background spans IT consulting, application production support, and academic research in process mining, where I first learned to map how teams actually work and identify bottlenecks that are harming them. That mix of technical depth and people-first thinking shapes what I deliver.
I work remotely from Portugal, fluent in portuguese and english, and I start every project the same way: by understanding both the business as well as the people it serves.
Behind the work,
a person who cares
BACKGROUND
Years 2018 - 2023
In 2018, I began my Bachelor's degree in Informatics Engineering at the University of Coimbra, graduating in 2021. That same year, I started my Master's degree at the same university, specialising in Software Engineering.
It was during my thesis, in 2023, that I came across process mining: a technique that turns a company's everyday data and logs into a map of how its workflows really happen, weak points included. My goal was to study six groups of students developing college projects using agile methodologies, and build a system that pulled data from their online repositories, using only the information available in their logs to mine their processes.
The moment I generated the first visual model that clearly showed the process each team was actually following was a real hooray moment for me - the kind that makes you fall in love with your research.
Years 2023 - 2024
In 2023, while finishing my dissertation, I was offered a position at Arpa Elastic Solutions: a portuguese IT consultancy specialising in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and software development.
During my first few months, I researched the process mining tools, systems and software available on the market at the time, documenting and comparing them in detail. I also attended client meetings and carried out the requirements elicitation for several projects, often acting as the main point of contact between my colleagues and the client.
After some time, I was asked to look into Microsoft Power BI and start learning how to use it. Once I felt confident with the tool, I was given the project of redesigning the company's KPI database into a star-schema model, then using Power BI to build the Dashboards that gave management a clear, real-time view of the business as a whole. In my final months in the company, I moved into a more consultative role, helping other teams improve their Power BI dashboards and work with them through the bottlenecks and issues they were facing.
Years 2024 - 2026
In summer 2024, Alenia Consulting introduced me to a new corner of the tech world: Application Production Support (APS). I joined the second edition of their academy in Portugal, where senior consultants ran intensive courses on what it means to work in APS, the ITIL framework, best practices for on-call work, how to stay composed under pressure during urgent issues, and the fundamentals of the banking and finance industry. The academy concluded with an exam, after which I earned the ITIL Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management.
During this six-month academy, we alternated between classroom days and on-site work at BNP Paribas in Lisbon, embedded with the team we'd been assigned to. This blend let us learn by doing: as I picked up my team's practices and grew familiar with the systems we used, I started out handling functional requests.
Once certified, I felt ready to combine these new skills with the knowledge I'd gained at university, and began taking on more technical requests, bigger issues, and greater responsibility. My team worked under the Follow-The-Sun model, which sharpened my ability to organise and coordinate - knowing who to contact and when. I was assigned start-of-day and end-of-day tasks alongside monitoring tasks to ensure the continuity of the service, and helped grow and improve the team's knowledge base by documenting new procedures so everyone stayed in the loop. By my final months, I was leading the implementation of changes, detecting and tracking issues to make sure none went idle, and chairing meetings with the right people whenever there was something urgent that needed addressing.
When my team leads learned about my Power BI background, they handed me a project to build a Power BI dashboard fed by data from Jira - the ticketing system we used to track daily requests and issues - to show KPIs and give management a clear view of the team's performance.