Senior Software Engineer
· Red Hat / Ansible
Luiz Felipe Costa
Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years across cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI/automation, and DevOps. Currently designing authentication and authorization for an agentic AI project on the Ansible Automation Platform.
Curitiba, PR · Brazil
UTC−3
he/him
pt-BR · en
01About
I'm a senior engineer who likes the unglamorous area — the security controls nobody wants to own, the CI pipeline that everyone depends on, the migration that has to happen once and run right. After 10+ years across startups, consulting, government platforms, and now the Ansible AI team at Red Hat, I've come to believe that most "hard" problems are really a lot of small problems stacked in a way that hides the load-bearing pieces.
These days I work on the Ansible Automation Platform, building agentic AI systems and owning their security foundations — authentication, policy-based authorization, and service-to-service mTLS, designed in from the start instead of bolted on later. I share what I learn on thenets.org and (occasionally, in Portuguese) on DedNets.
Outside of work I design little things, run a homelab that I clearly overengineered, and keep a running vote between Watch_Dogs 2 and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap as the best game ever made.
02Now
Current focus
Agentic AI at Red Hat. Building an agentic AI project for intelligent automation on the Ansible Automation Platform. My part is the security foundation: who can do what, to which resources, and how services prove who they are to each other.
03Career
Senior Software Engineer
Red Hat · Ansible Automation Platform
Building an agentic AI project on AAP, and owning its authentication and authorization.
- Designed and led the authorization system for an agentic AI project on AAP — policy-based access control with users, groups, roles, and scoping, across backend and UI, built as a stable contract the other feature teams build on
- Architected the authentication foundations, then handed them to teammates to carry on their own; built a prototype to attack my own design before shipping it
- Led the design and testing of service-to-service mTLS, and a policy engine migration that spanned several teams
- Built the router discovery and WebSocket/async infrastructure, with authorization enforced on every WebSocket endpoint
- Mentored engineers and brought red-green testing and test plans into the team's daily workflow
- Transformed team dynamics through daily PR reviews, cross-team engagement, and collaborative decision-making — a measurable "before/after" shift in team culture
- Previously led the CVE sustainability initiative for the Ansible cloud offer, designing long-lasting solutions for vulnerability management across the organization
- Previously championed SDL implementation, working with Product Security to establish controls throughout the dev process
Software Engineer
Red Hat · Ansible Automation Platform
- 🏆 Received the Red Hat Security Team award for discovering and documenting critical gaps in AAP cloud account security configuration, preventing defects before customer impact
- Built downstreaming tooling that drastically reduced build iteration time by tracking remote dependencies and enabling offline resolution
- Delivered critical customer support under tight deadlines across RHEL, SELinux, Podman, and AAP, ensuring successful migrations
- Designed significant automated testing enhancements for Ansible on Cloud, simplifying creation of secure dev environments
- Implemented security controls behind the compliance audits of Ansible Automation Platform Service on AWS — access, change management, monitoring, and risk mitigation
- Owned CVE resolution for the cloud offer and led the static analysis (SAST) migration, working with Product Security on the delivery policy
- Wrote the team's first release SOP, after a release that went wrong
Software Quality Engineer
Red Hat · Ansible Automation Platform
- Led Quality Engineering for AAP on AWS Marketplaces — from initial design through successful launch, establishing the QE process and test strategy
- Maintained and enhanced internal CI/CD pipelines for Automation Controller (AAP's main component), improving build reliability
- Created internal learning sessions on Ansible and Linux fundamentals, onboarding multiple team members
DevOps Engineer
Nextios
- Architected and deployed disaster recovery & backup solutions for banking clients on AWS
- Led on-premise to cloud migration for a banking customer, modernizing with a security-first Infrastructure-as-Code approach
- Created CI/CD pipelines and high-availability clusters using ECS and EKS (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Contributed to AWS competencies certification via PoCs and workshops for ECS, EKS, and GPU-optimized AI workloads
- Developed a GitOps solution using Terraform Cloud + VCS to standardize deployments across teams
Infrastructure Consultant / DevOps Engineer
B2ML & LEMOBS · Concurrent consulting roles
- Architected financial-system microservices on AWS ECS with Terraform & CloudFront
- Migrated 90+ legacy applications to Docker Swarm
- Improved SLIs to >99% uptime while reducing infrastructure costs
- Architected and migrated a smart-cities platform to AWS using EC2 & Linux containers
- Built CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, Jenkins, and Ansible for legacy and greenfield apps
DevOps Engineer
ROI Hunter
- Created Ansible roles for internal applications and tooling
- Automated GCP Cloud Builders workflows for container image builds and GKE deployments with Ansible & Terraform
DevOps / Full-Stack Developer
CAPGov / MUDES
- Led the development of the Brazilian Open Data Portal (dados.gov.br) — the 4th iteration, built on a custom CKAN plugin in Python, JavaScript, and CSS
- Main developer for the Combate Aedes platform, leading a complete redesign and refactor with technical leadership responsibilities
- Created tools, CI/CD pipelines, and documentation for team collaboration
04Projects
Ansible Automation Platform
Where I work today. Building agentic AI systems and their security foundations — authentication, authorization, and mTLS for Red Hat's flagship automation platform.
dednets.com
My side project. Connects private machines behind NAT through a hosted control plane — publish apps over HTTPS, share services with teammates, and keep a terminal alive from anywhere. Rootless and outbound-only.
dados.gov.br
Main developer of the 4th iteration of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. Custom CKAN plugin in Python, with a heavy rewrite of the front-end.
05Stack
Daily drivers
- Python 9y
- Ansible 7y
- Bash 10y
- Go 3y
Infrastructure
- Podman / Docker 7y
- Kubernetes 5y
- Terraform 5y
- Vault 3y
Cloud
- AWS EC2/ECS/EKS
- GCP GKE
- CI/CD GH / GL / Jenkins
- IaC & GitOps daily
Security & Linux
- CVE management ongoing
- SELinux scars
- RHEL / Fedora 10y
- SDL champion
- AuthN / AuthZ RBAC · mTLS
06Talks
07Quotes
"Luiz Felipe is a very capable software developer who can get things done, go and find solutions to difficult technical problems, collaborate in a team, engage the community and proactively contribute to open source software. His contributions to the 3rd and 4th iterations of the Brazilian Open Data Portal (dados.gov.br) were quite significant, all of which are open source and available on GitHub."
AH
Augusto Herrmann
Creator of the Brazilian Open Data Portal
"Luiz is an excellent professional. He has helped us create an excellent server infrastructure in our company."
BV
Bernardo Vasconcelos de Carvalho
CEO · B2ML
Improved SLIs to >99% uptime while reducing infrastructure costs.
More recommendations on LinkedIn.
08Education
Federal University of Itajubá (UNIFEI)
B.Sc. Computer Information Systems · Scholarship program
2012 — 2018
Colégio Embraer Juarez Wanderley
High school · Engineering & mathematics focus · Scholarship program
2009 — 2011