Lead Data Engineer · Data & AI Architecture · MSc Researcher @ IME-USP · Text-to-SQL
I build large-scale data platforms and production AI systems, and I research natural language interfaces for databases.
At work I own the data and AI architecture of a global e-commerce (LATAM and Europe): event-driven ingestion on GCP, a medallion lakehouse on BigQuery, and a WhatsApp customer service agent built with LangGraph on Vertex AI, with RAG, MCP tool calling and evaluation pipelines. Before that I spent 7 years on distributed data systems, including a 12-node, 3-AZ Cassandra cluster handling 1.46B+ writes a day at 13µs P50 latency and 99.99% availability.
At USP my research sits between NLP and databases: how to fine-tune compact LLMs to translate Portuguese questions into executable geospatial SQL.
AtlasSQL-BR: A Brazilian Portuguese Geospatial Text-to-SQL Dataset with Spatial Hierarchies Diego O. Lopes, Kelly R. Braghetto. Proceedings of the 41st Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD 2026), pp. 85-98. Paper · Code · Dataset
MSc in Computer Science, IME-USP (dissertation submitted, defense in October 2026), advised by Prof. Kelly R. Braghetto.
Interests
- Natural language interfaces for databases and semantic parsing
- LLM fine-tuning for specialized domains (PEFT: LoRA, IA³)
- Execution-based evaluation of generated SQL
- Portuguese and other low-resource settings in Text-to-SQL
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| atlas-sql-br | Geospatial Text-to-SQL dataset in Portuguese, fine-tuning pipeline and execution-based evaluation framework (PostGIS, sqlglot, MLflow) |
| matrix-kernel-optimization | Matrix multiplication in C, from naive loop to cache-blocked and vectorized, profiled with gprof and perf. 99.3% less execution time than baseline |
Languages Python · SQL · C Distributed data Apache Cassandra · Kafka · Apache Iceberg · Trino · Spark · Flink Cloud and platform GCP (BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Vertex AI, Dataform) · AWS (S3, EC2, Glue) · Airflow · dbt AI engineering LangGraph · Vertex AI Agent Engine · RAG · MCP · PyTorch · Hugging Face Transformers · PEFT Databases PostgreSQL/PostGIS · Cassandra · MongoDB
- Text-to-SQL and natural language interfaces for relational and geospatial databases
- LLM evaluation for specialized or low-resource domains
- NLP datasets and benchmarks in Portuguese
- Large-scale data platform architecture
📫 [email protected] · datafromlopes.com
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