Curriculum vitae

Afonso Marques

Systems Engineer. Backend, Security Automation & Data Infrastructure

Lisbon, Portugal

Summary

Systems Engineer on Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control team, building systems that help customers understand and control how AI crawlers interact with their sites at global edge scale. Background in scalable backend systems and security automation: REST APIs, distributed pipelines, large scale web scraping, and firmware reverse engineering. Previously technical owner at Coalition, delivering measurable impact from performance work to high value security tooling. M.Sc. in Computer Science (Cyber Security).

Key skills

Languages & frameworks
Python, Go, Java, FastAPI
Data & infra
Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, S3, Prefect
Cloud & DevOps
AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3), Docker, Terraform, CI/CD
Security & tooling
Firmware reverse engineering, vulnerability fingerprinting, incident response, security data collection
Practices
API design, multi worker architectures, performance tuning, code review, mentoring, cross functional collaboration

Experience

Systems Engineer, AI Crawl Control

Cloudflare · Lisbon, Portugal · 2026 to Present

  • Engineer on the AI Crawl Control team, building product capabilities that let site owners monitor, understand, and control AI crawler traffic on the Cloudflare network.
  • Ship backend and platform features at edge scale, working across services that operate on high volume, globally distributed traffic.

Software Engineer, Scanning Engine

Coalition, Inc. · Remote, USA · Mar 2023 to 2026

  • Technical owner for the Executive Risk platform: lead design, implementation, and delivery of backend features that support risk assessment and security analytics.
  • Designed and maintained REST APIs that enable reliable integration between internal services and external partners, supporting high throughput data flows.
  • Built and operated large scale web scrapers and ingestion pipelines, automating the collection of security telemetry and threat data.
  • Optimized a multi worker processing architecture, increasing data throughput by ~40% and reducing processing latency.
  • Led incident response and production troubleshooting, improving monitoring and alerting to reduce issue recurrence and maintain uptime above 99.9%.
  • Mentored new engineers and conducted code reviews to uphold engineering standards and foster collaboration.

Python, Go, FastAPI, Kafka, Prefect, Docker, Redis, PostgreSQL, Terraform, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3), Elasticsearch

Intern

BinaryEdge · Remote, USA · Jul 2021 to Sep 2021

  • Developed and maintained RESTful APIs and security tooling for large scale internet data collection.
  • Implemented scalable scraping components and containerized solutions to reliably gather and expose security telemetry.
  • Produced technical documentation and user guides to improve adoption and handoff.

FastAPI, Docker, Python, Redis, GitHub

Intern

GMV · Lisbon · Jul 2019 to Sep 2019

  • Refactored legacy Java code to improve performance and maintainability; developed automated tests and deployment scripts.
  • Wrote Bash automation for deployments and system tasks; supported VM based test environments.

Java, Python, Sikuli, Bash, VMs

Selected projects & impact

Fortinet firmware reverse engineering & fingerprinting

Coalition

  • Reverse engineered Fortinet firmware to extract deterministic version indicators and implementation details.
  • Designed and implemented a fingerprinting tool that identifies firmware versions at scale.
  • Enabled accurate version tracking across customer fleets, unlocking vulnerability mapping against CVEs.
  • Business impact: Improved vulnerability detection and supported product capabilities that generated over $40M in annual revenue.

Multi worker ingestion optimisation

Coalition

Restructured worker pools and queueing logic to increase throughput and decrease processing latency for security data pipelines.

Education

M.Sc. Computer Science & Engineering (Cyber Security & Cyber Physical Systems)

Lisbon University · Sep 2020 to Nov 2022

Master thesis: AuditChain, blockchain views applied to auditing

B.Sc. Computer Engineering

Lusófona University of Technologies · Sep 2017 to Jul 2020

Certifications

CompTIA Network+ (in progress)

Additional

Languages: English (fluent), Portuguese (native)

Interests: Security research, reverse engineering, distributed systems