Senior Data Platform Engineer Jan 2026 — Present
MoonPay
Building and operating a modern Data Platform for a global crypto payments company.
Afonso Costa
About
Afonso Costa
Senior Data Platform Engineer
I'm a Portuguese Data Engineer based in Bristol, and the UK has been home for quite a few years now. I currently build and operate data infrastructure for a crypto payments company, with a focus on streaming pipelines and reliable analytics workflows.
Throughout the years, I've worked across several industries, including telecoms, healthcare, research, and digital marketing, and currently in crypto. I hold an MSc in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, later moved through clinical data management and research, and eventually transitioned fully into Data Engineering. I also enjoy building self-hosted tooling in my spare time.
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
Career
Experience
Roles focused on building reliable Data Platforms and helping teams ship with confidence.
Senior Data Engineer Jan 2022 — Jan 2026
giffgaff
Designed and delivered petabyte-scale data products on AWS, turning high-velocity Kafka and batch feeds into trusted Snowflake data products.
Senior Data Engineer
Oct 2024 — Jan 2026
Data Engineer
Jan 2022 — Oct 2024
- • Designed and implemented scalable ingestion for high-velocity Kafka streams and batch feeds into Snowflake, ensuring GDPR and security compliance at scale.
- • Applied Data Vault 2.0 with dbt to model and transform datasets, enabling robust self-serve analytics for stakeholders.
- • Architected GDPR-compliant microservices for real-time stream processing with low-latency and fault-tolerant performance.
- • Orchestrated and monitored pipelines with Argo Workflows on Kubernetes to improve timeliness, reliability, and data integrity.
- • Developed automation frameworks, alerting systems, and CLI tooling to streamline developer workflows and operational efficiency.
Clinical Database Manager Jan 2021 — Jan 2022
University of Bristol / UK Kidney Association
Managed tranSMART, a data warehouse for clinical data, supporting secure, high-quality clinical research analytics.
- • Owned user management, server administration, security controls and backup routines.
- • Developed and maintained ETL pipelines for clinical data ingestion and curation.
- • Provided operational support to researchers to improve self-serve analytics usage.
- • Developed and maintained processes for missing data reporting, validation, and anonymization.
- • Helped enforce data quality and governance standards across research datasets.
Researcher Jul 2020 — Dec 2020
University of Porto and Bosch Security Systems
Project Safe Cities: Building Urban Safety.
- • Researched anomaly detection in time-series data for urban safety applications.
Build
Projects
A few things I build on my spare time, mostly around tooling, observability, and self-hosted services.
Firefly CLI
A Python-based command line interface for conveniently entering expenses in Firefly III, the self-hosted personal finance manager. Published on PyPI with an interactive shell powered by cmd2.
Python CLI PyPI Self-hosted
Homelab
Infrastructure-as-code and self-hosting setup for my personal homelab, covering services, networking, and operational automation.
Homelab IaC Self-hosted Automation
Ready, Set, Develop
An opinionated, reproducible workstation bootstrap system built with Ansible. Automates macOS developer environment setup including dotfiles, tooling, and configurations.
Ansible Shell macOS Automation
Octo Usage
Fetches electricity consumption data from the Octopus Energy API and persists it to a PostgreSQL database. Designed to run as a cronjob for continuous energy usage tracking.
Python PostgreSQL REST Cronjob
Connect
Contact
Always up for discussing engineering problems, open-source projects or all-things data!