CV

Education, experience and awards. The full academic record is on Lattes.

Contact Information

Name Fernando Maia da Mota
Professional Title Data & AI Software Engineer | Applied AI, MLOps, Cloud Data Platforms | PhD student at UFMS
Email fernando.mota@ufms.br

Professional Summary

PhD student at FACOM/UFMS working on text anonymization under the inference capabilities of large language models, and Senior Data & AI Software Engineer at LIA, building production AI systems for legal documents at the State Attorney’s Office of Mato Grosso do Sul (PGE-MS). 15+ years in industry building data platforms and applied AI systems, including technical lead of a data and AI team that grew from 3 to 12 people and delivered an analytics lakehouse, an enterprise LLM platform and production RAG applications.

Experience

  • 2026 - present

    Campo Grande, Brazil

    Senior Data & AI Software Engineer (Applied AI)
    LIA – Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial
    • Public-sector innovation project that automates judicial processes at the State Attorney’s Office of Mato Grosso do Sul (PGE-MS), with a focus on healthcare-related cases.
    • Design of solution and data architectures for production AI systems: document analysis, legal text automation and expert-calculation support.
    • NLP and machine learning over large volumes of legal documents; AI-driven pipelines that automate repetitive workflows.
    • Integration with existing government data systems, with attention to accuracy, auditability and governance.
  • 2022 - 2026
    Data Science and AI Tech Lead
    Plaenge Group
    • Built and led the data team, from 3 to 12 people across data engineering, analytics engineering and applied AI; set technical standards and mentored engineers coming from economics and business analytics.
    • Enterprise AI platform (LLM hub): designed a single internal API for LLM access, with authentication, auditing and guardrails by default, plus shared endpoints for embeddings and RAG. It serves a GenAI sales-development chat that handles 200–300 conversations a day and an internal expert-search tool.
    • BIM analytics platform: modeled IFC building models as graphs and loaded them into a Bronze/Silver/Gold lakehouse covering 70+ active and 50+ completed projects (700+ models), giving the BIM team cross-project indicators of model quality and clash history. Proofs of concept: gnn_bim, graphrag_bim.
    • CRM to lakehouse sync: incremental synchronization of Microsoft Dynamics (Dataverse) data into Delta tables, which moved analytics out of the CRM and cut Dataverse storage from about 750 GB to 200 GB.
    • Schedule: a declarative ingestion framework on Spark and Delta Lake (Azure Synapse) that let junior engineers add sources by configuration; it ran about 20,000 ingestion jobs a month at peak.
    • Led the migration of QlikView solutions and on-premises Power BI reports to a cloud lakehouse with Delta tables and a governed semantic layer in Power BI workspaces.
    • Lakehouse on Azure Data Lake and Delta Lake, with Azure Synapse, Data Factory, Apache Spark, Airflow and DuckDB. Architecture work contributed to an estimated 25–35% reduction in analytics processing costs.
  • 2016 - 2022
    Founder and Data Architect
    Bov BI – Business Intelligence for Agribusiness
    • Founded and ran an analytics consultancy for agribusiness, from requirements with business leaders to deployment.
    • Agribusiness analytics platform: BI platform for a cattle producers association with 600+ producers and about 1,200 farms, with drill-down from executive KPIs to individual producers; it replaced manual reporting that took weeks and gave auditable metrics for negotiations with industry partners.
    • Data warehouse design, ETL, OLAP cubes, reports and dashboards (Pentaho).
    • ERP, web and mobile development (Python/Django, Node.js APIs, Ionic).
  • 2012 - 2015
    Senior BI Analyst and Business Intelligence Instructor
    IT4biz IT Solutions
    • Instructor of the Pentaho suite; development of OLAP cubes, dashboards and ETL processes.
    • Principal committer of open-source Pentaho community extensions: Kettle Web Integrator (web integration layer for Pentaho Data Integration), Saiku Chart Plus (extra charts for Saiku Analytics) and Pentaho CE Audit (auditing and monitoring for Pentaho Community Edition).
  • 2014 - 2015
    Substitute Lecturer
    Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS)
    • Introduction to Digital Systems; Foundations of Object-Oriented Programming; Topics in Information Systems; Software Analysis and Design; Algorithms and Programming.
  • 2009 - 2011
    Undergraduate Researcher and Project Assistant
    Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS)
    • Data webhouse that consolidated national INEP school census data and state education systems, with drill-down from state to student level and indicators such as age–grade distortion and IDEB inputs.
    • Research in data warehousing, Linked Data and web development; analyst for UFMS distance-education and institutional-evaluation systems.

Education

  • 2024 - present

    Campo Grande, Brazil

    PhD (in progress)
    Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS)
    Computer Science
    • Research: text anonymization under the inference capabilities of large language models.
    • Advisor: Prof. Edson Takashi Matsubara. Co-advisor: Prof. Jonathan de Andrade Silva.
  • 2013 - 2016

    Campo Grande, Brazil

    Professional MSc
    Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS)
    Applied Computing
    • Thesis: Uma Abordagem de Análises OLAP e de Mineração de Dados para Suporte à Tomada de Decisão no Setor da Pecuária de Corte do Brasil.
    • Advisor: Prof. Renato Porfirio Ishii. Co-advisor: Rodrigo da Costa Gomes.
  • 2007 - 2011

    Coxim, Brazil

    BSc
    Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), Coxim campus
    Information Systems
    • Final project: Uma Estratégia para Publicação dos Dados da Base do CEB-INEP/MEC no Padrão Linked Open Data.
    • Advisor: Prof. Karen Kiomi Nakazato.

Awards

  • 2011
    Outstanding Student of the 2011 class, BSc in Information Systems (UFMS/CPCX)
    Brazilian Computer Society (SBC)
  • 2010
    Motion of Applause
    Campus Council, UFMS Coxim campus
  • 2009
    2nd place in the presentation of accepted papers, XXVII ENECOMP
    National Congress of Computing Students (ENECOMP)

Skills

Applied AI and LLMs: RAG, embeddings, AI agents, LLM platforms and governance, GraphRAG, graph neural networks
Data engineering: Lakehouse (Bronze/Silver/Gold), Apache Spark, Delta Lake, Airflow, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, data warehousing, OLAP
Languages and tools: Python, SQL, Neo4j, Power BI, Pentaho, Docker
Cloud: Microsoft Azure, Azure AI Foundry, AWS

Languages

Portuguese : Native speaker
English : Full professional proficiency