Senior Data Platform Engineer Jan 2026 — Present
MoonPay
Building and operating a modern Data Platform for a global crypto payments company.
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.
Python CLI FireflyIII Personal Finance
homelab
GitOps-driven homelab. Self-hosted. Automated. Encrypted.
Kubernetes Ansible Terraform homelab ArgoCD
Ready, Set, Develop™
An opinionated, reproducible workstation bootstrap system built with Ansible. Automates macOS developer environment setup including dotfiles, tooling, and configurations.
Ansible macOS dotfiles Automation
OctoTrack
Electricity consumption, Agile tariff rates & cost dashboard for Octopus Energy customers.
Python Streamlit Docker Octopus Energy