Diogo Lacerda

Lead engineer for the studio’s award-nominated and flagship title Gordon Ramsay's Chef Blast. Provided technical direction while leading a team of five engineers and coordinating delivery across Engineering, QA, Production, and Design. Partnered with Production to plan a demanding two-week release cycle, breaking down features into realistic timelines. Reduced technical debt while maintaining feature delivery by improving code maintainability and enabling faster future development. Introduced SOLID principles, TDD, and CI/CD practices to improve engineering consistency and code quality. Drove architectural improvements through targeted refactoring to make systems easier to extend and maintain.

Worked on live mobile games played by millions of users, implementing gameplay systems and backend integrations in C++ and C#. Delivered live services, engagement, and monetisation features supporting long-term player retention. Implemented large-scale social systems, including Clans and Chat. Modernised legacy systems through incremental refactoring to improve maintainability and reduce development friction. Collaborated closely with designers, artists, QA, and producers across the product lifecycle and influenced architectural decisions and engineering standards across multiple projects.

Built middleware supporting Banco Angolano de Investimentos (BAI), serving more than 2.8 million users. Designed secure middleware and back-office services for mobile banking. Developed a scalable voucher management platform with security and encryption at its core. Reverse engineered proprietary banking hardware protocols for systems integration and worked directly with clients to define requirements and improve delivery quality.