João Lago

Led engineering and data functions end-to-end: architecture, delivery, hiring, and vendor management for a platform serving hundreds of cinema distributors and chains across multiple countries. Designed and built Houston, a campaign management and estimation platform processing 8 years of data across 8 advertising platforms, increasing the productivity of ad operations, account management, and sales teams by about 300%, enabling them to scale client volume without growing headcount. Created a Data Analytics function and guided the build-out of Gruvi’s data warehouse, aggregating data from advertising platforms plus external sources (box office, weather, imdb) via ETL/ELT pipelines (Cloud Functions, BigQuery, dbt) into client-facing dashboards. Drove CI/CD adoption, oversaw infrastructure migrations, and championed internal tools like Notion that became central to company-wide operations. Operated as a hands-on technical contributor throughout, fostering an open and collaborative engi

Owned development of Gruvi’s most critical systems: a CMS powering landing pages with thousands of monthly users, campaign reporting dashboards used by 100+ corporate clients, audience research tools, and cinema partner integrations. Architected the initial data warehouse under a €500K EU-funded grant — designed extraction and transformation pipelines aggregating disparate sources into performant dashboards. Led GDPR compliance across all technical systems and served as the primary technical resource for non-engineering teams.

Built and iterated on Gruvi’s Content Management System and integrated their third-party platform APIs into the company’s early reporting infrastructure.