themarceloribeiro.com

Marcelo Sousa Ribeiro.

AI / LLM Engineer · Senior Full-Stack (15+ years)San Francisco, CA, US · Authorized to work in the US

AI/LLM engineer and senior full-stack engineer with 15+ years shipping and scaling production platforms. Currently founding engineer at FlooxAI, building an agentic platform (35+ connectors, 100+ tools, Claude/GPT/Gemini/Llama via OpenRouter, RAG over pgvector and Qdrant, thousands of agent runs per week) and author of Turnstile, an open-source LLM proxy that cut our AI spend ~35%. Previously: zero-downtime database sharding at Deliveroo, payments lead for 1.5M subscriptions at BarkBox, Apple/Google Wallet hotel keys across 4,000+ hotels at Canary, and founder of a 15-engineer software house. Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby · FastAPI, Next.js, Rails · AWS. Based in San Francisco, authorized to work in the US.

01Where I've worked

Experience

Founding EngineerFlooxAI

Oct 2025 — Present

Remote

Founding engineer on an agentic AI platform that connects LLMs to the business tools people already use (HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail) and to third-party MCP servers, so agents can carry out real multi-step work.

  • Built the agent runtime connecting LLMs to 35+ business connectors and 100+ tools via LangChain, Composio, and third-party MCP servers — running thousands of agent runs per week.
  • Multi-model routing across Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Llama via OpenRouter, with RAG over pgvector and Qdrant.
  • Deployed Turnstile (my open-source LLM proxy) in front of production agent traffic, cutting AI spend ~35% through per-session budgets and runaway-loop detection.
  • Designed credit-based agent workflows for multi-step tasks: analyzing analytics and graphical data, preparing events, and drafting OKRs.
  • Shipped the full stack end to end — FastAPI backend, Next.js frontend, and React Native mobile.

Senior Software EngineerCanary Technologies

Mar 2024 — Oct 2025

Remote

Lead developer on the hotel guest journey — mobile room keys and the in-hotel digital compendium (upgrades, room service, amenities) — live across 4,000+ hotels.

  • Led development of Apple Wallet / Google Wallet mobile room keys for chains including Wyndham and IHG, integrating Apple PassKit and the Vostio and Dormakaba lock SDKs.
  • Owned the upgrades and room-service flows of the compendium across frontend and backend, including Stripe payments (Python, TypeScript).
  • Built the tipping and feedback service, integrated with Google and TripAdvisor.

Lead Full-Stack EngineerTPXImpact

Jul 2022 — Feb 2024

Remote

Led full-stack development of tools for UK local governments to manage council homes, tenants, and tenant–council communication, built to GOV.UK standards and accessibility requirements (Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, AWS).

  • Led a team of 3 building and optimizing council-management tools.
  • Built systems for benefits and payment collection from council homes.
  • Brought UX and UI to GOV.UK accessibility standards, driving meaningful gains in tool adoption.
  • Planned and executed deployment strategies that streamlined production releases and cut downtime.

Senior Full-Stack EngineerDeliveroo

Jun 2020 — Jul 2022

Remote

Worked across the platform for the UK's leading food-delivery service, focused on database performance and a large-scale, multi-market sharding effort (Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS).

  • Drove the zero-downtime sharding of the monolithic PostgreSQL database — migrated to UUID keys and split it into 20+ shards across market areas (UK, EU, Emirates) to absorb major growth in traffic.
  • Cut the top-10 slowest queries from ~5s to ~350ms average through denormalization and index improvements.

Senior Software EngineerBarkBox

Oct 2017 — Jun 2020

Remote

Led the payments team (4 engineers, 1 QA) and was a key developer in warehouse management and fulfillment for a subscription business that grew past 2 million subscribers (Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue.js, AWS).

  • Owned payments end to end for 1.5M active subscriptions — ~700K recurring charges per month across recurring and gift subscriptions, gift cards, and multiple recurrence models, integrated with Recurly.
  • Built the assignment logic determining which products shipped for each subscription.
  • Built warehouse-management and fulfillment features, integrating Pitney Bowes.

Lead Software EngineerCrystalCommerce

Oct 2015 — Oct 2017

Remote

Led a team of 6 on a high-traffic marketplace for the game and hobby industry — 1,200+ online stores, ~2M orders/month, 5M monthly active users.

  • Built an Elasticsearch cluster with geocode search over hundreds of millions of records, cutting unified search from 20+ seconds to ~1 second.
  • Added frontend caching and a JSON layer to keep the high-traffic platform fast.
  • Led a datacenter migration of 40+ servers/instances — DNS, PostgreSQL, MySQL, EC2, and S3.

Founder & Lead EngineerRubyThree Information Services

Feb 2010 — Oct 2015

Dublin, CA

Founded and ran a software house of 15 engineers delivering Ruby on Rails APIs, JavaScript frontends (React, Angular, Ember.js), and native iOS (Swift, Objective-C) and Android apps for clients.

  • Hired and led a team of 15 engineers across backend, web, and mobile delivery.
  • Hands-on architecture and delivery lead for client projects from Rails APIs through React/Angular/Ember frontends to native iOS and Android apps.

Freelance Software EngineerSelf-employed

2008 — Feb 2010

Web development for clients in PHP, Perl, and JavaScript.

02Public work

Open Source

Turnstilesession-layer circuit breaker for LLM / agent traffic

github.com/marceloribeiro/turnstile

A transparent streaming proxy between an app and any LLM provider that meters every agent session in real time and trips a circuit breaker the instant one session goes rogue (a runaway agent loop or a blown budget) — without taking down the rest of the app. Drop-in (swap one base URL, no SDK changes), session-precise, fail-open. Running in production at FlooxAI, where it cut AI spend ~35%.

  • Go data plane (stdlib only): streaming proxy, provider adapters for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenRouter, session resolution, metering/pricing, and synchronous pre-execution enforcement.
  • ~6 µs median added latency, self-instrumented, with a CI latency gate that fails the build on regression.
  • FastAPI control plane (PostgreSQL, Redis) and Next.js dashboard with live telemetry over WebSocket; raw prompts and API keys are never persisted.
03Capabilities

What I build

/Backends & APIs

FastAPI services

Production APIs with JWT auth, SQLAlchemy 2 + Alembic migrations, PostgreSQL, REST + WebSocket — deployed behind nginx + systemd.

Event-driven microservices

Several small services around an Events API hub with webhook dispatch and a JWT authority — for when one monolith isn't the right shape.

Background jobs

Celery + Redis for long-running and scheduled work: enrichment pipelines, async LLM calls, and fan-out tasks.

/Web, Mobile & TypeScript

Next.js web apps

App Router + React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn. Typed API clients, zod validation, and HTTP + WebSocket against the backend.

React Native mobile

Cross-platform apps with HTTP + WebSocket + FCM push, deep links, and App Store / Play Store releases via fastlane.

Typed end to end

TypeScript from the API contract through the client — domain types mirror the backend models so the whole stack stays honest.

/AI & Agents

Agentic apps with LangChain

Persistent LLM chat where the model calls tools wired to real services and the database, with replies streaming token-by-token over WebSocket.

Tool-calling on real data

LangChain @tool wrappers over service operations, context-injected user + DB session — the model acts on real records, never raw SQL or secrets.

Third-party tools via Composio

Web search, Gmail, Slack and more as fallback tools alongside native ones, enabled per-deployment from a DB-backed admin registry.

/Product surfaces

Visual page / storefront builder

Composable page components with a drag-and-drop admin canvas and a public renderer — non-devs compose pages from typed blocks.

Ecommerce + Stripe

Product catalog, cart, checkout, and orders — with Stripe payments, saved cards, and subscriptions.

Organizations & multi-tenancy

Orgs, members, roles, and invitations — the backbone for B2B and team-based products.

Media, tags & domains

Org-scoped media on S3, polymorphic tagging, and in-app domain registration + DNS through a registrar API.

/Ship & operate

Domain → production, end to end

Register a domain, deploy API + frontend to a server, wire DNS, and serve over HTTPS — automated. (This very site shipped that way.)

Operations & reliability

CI/CD, health checks, CORS, staging/rollback, backups, Sentry, transactional email, security headers, and rate limits.

Infra & storage

Docker Compose sidecars (Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch), S3 public/private buckets, nginx + systemd, and Let's Encrypt TLS.

Tested in real browsers

Playwright end-to-end suites with page objects, auth fixtures, and CI integration.

04Toolkit

Skills

AI / LLM

Agentic systemsLLM orchestration & tool-calling (LangChain, LangGraph, Composio, MCP)OpenAI APIAnthropic API (Claude)GeminiMulti-model routing (OpenRouter)RAG / embeddingspgvectorQdrantEvalsPrompt engineeringLLM observability (Langfuse, LangSmith)Streaming LLM proxying & metering

Languages

PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptRubyGo

Frameworks

FastAPISQLAlchemyNext.jsReactReact NativeTailwind CSSRuby on RailsVue.js

Architecture & Data

PostgreSQLRedisElasticsearchCeleryWebSocketsMicroservicesAPI designSystem scalingStripeRecurly

Cloud & DevOps

AWSS3DockerDocker ComposeKubernetesTerraformGitHub Actions / CI/CDnginxsystemdPlaywright
05Education

Education

University of São Paulo

BSc, Physics with Scientific Software Programming · São Paulo, Brazil

2008
06Currently building

vibeworkin

AI tools for productivity — my YouTube channel. Latest videos below.

Watch on YouTube
07Get in touch

Let's talk