Rafael Roman
I am the co-founder and CTO of Upgrid, in Basel. I have spent twenty years building software where being wrong costs someone money.
São Paulo
I studied Systems Analysis and Information Technology at FATEC Sorocaba between 2005 and 2009, and started working in banking delivery before I was done. My first professional chapter was at GFT Technologies: rich internet applications for international banking clients, then mobile, where I built internal SDKs and frameworks and led a small team shipping an internal app store.
In 2012 I joined IBM's innovation lab in Hortolândia as a Java Technical Lead. I led a team building an internal product to detect and prevent leakage of confidential information across the company, and took it from prototype through design and delivery into production. It was the first time I owned a product end to end inside a large organisation.
On the side I ran Importa Brasil, an online bulletin board for people importing goods from Brazil, as sole owner and developer. At its peak it had more than 65,000 members and around 4,000 visits a day.
Lleida, then Barcelona
In 2015 I moved to Spain and rejoined GFT, in Lleida, as Software Architect and Tech Lead. For four years I delivered production banking platforms for financial institutions across Europe: core banking systems, compliance infrastructure, digital banking portals, microservices, cloud migration, and internal tooling that other delivery teams in the practice ended up using. I worked directly with client engineering leadership on architecture and led cross-functional teams.
Lleida is where I started speaking. I mentored master's projects at the Universitat de Lleida and spoke often through local meetup groups. In 2019 I gave a TEDx talk there, “AI Is Not the World of Movies, It's Already Reality” . Most of the Lleida sessions were never recorded; that one was.
I kept building things alone at night. Notastica automated receipt submission for Brazilian non-profits collecting tax donations, taking 45 seconds of manual work per receipt down to 3; it served more than 20 non-profits, processed 1.8 million receipts, and helped raise over R$1M. Crochet.land is a Flutter app I built and maintained solo, with 100,000+ downloads, around 18,000 monthly active users and a 4.9 rating.
N26, and Personio
I joined N26 in November 2019 and stayed four years. As Tech Lead I architected the fee charging platform that became standard infrastructure embedded in N26's ledger APIs across Europe. As Principal Engineer I delivered the architectural vision for payments, covering bank and peer-to-peer transfers, and for customer acquisition. I also led the overhaul of financial crime prevention: a static rule engine spread across microservices, replaced by a real-time Apache Flink streaming system in under six months.
That rebuild is what I have spoken about most. It became a KotlinConf talk in Copenhagen, and the event-driven architecture work around it became a Kafka Summit London session on the outbox pattern.
In March 2024 I moved to Personio as Principal Engineer, doing platform engineering at one of Europe's leading HR tech companies during a critical growth phase: technical direction for core platform services, engineering standards, and cross-team technical authority.
Basel
I co-founded Upgrid in January 2025 and built the platform from the first commit. Swiss energy reform had opened a window for Lokale Energiegemeinschaften, and the software underneath them did not exist yet: SDAT metering ingestion, fifteen-minute consumption allocation, a billing engine, Swiss QR-bill PDF generation, Bexio sync, and operator workflows for community formation and exception handling. Three regulated community models — ZEV, LEG and vZEV — run as distinct workflows, serving consumers, full operator accounts, co-brand partners and affiliates from one codebase. It carries 2k+ members, 250+ communities and 150+ municipalities today.
The architecture was a deliberate call for a small team: seven apps and ~70 workspace packages in a monorepo on a shared Postgres schema with row-level-security multi-tenancy, which is the opposite of the roughly 200-service estate I came from. I take product and go-to-market too when that is where the bottleneck sits: the savings calculator, the LEG explainer content, the co-brand and affiliate landing pages, the signup instrumentation.
From São Paulo, a decade in Spain, based in Basel. Walk the whole route on the map.
Speaking
I speak on stream processing and event-driven architecture, fraud prevention in regulated fintech, and the shape of an engineering career. Stages so far include Kafka Summit London, KotlinConf Copenhagen, WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, DevBCN, JavaCro and TEDxLleida, plus N26 meetups in Berlin and Barcelona. Every talk is listed here, with booking details.
Elsewhere
Get in touch
Energy and fintech infrastructure, teams shipping software into regulation, and conference programmes looking for a speaker: LinkedIn is where I read messages.
Message me on LinkedIn