CTO · Technology & AI Leadership
Gabriel
Rigon
Technology and AI leadership for work that can't afford to go wrong
Head of Technology at a small company with an outsized footprint, 16 years into a career built in Brazil and on international projects. The platforms I run serve over 2 million people a month across public health and education, where a bad call costs more than a rollback.
Where I add the most value
Three problem shapes that keep coming back, whatever the industry.
Owning the technology function
Architecture, delivery, infrastructure and the calls that carry real risk, held end to end. I've seen which decisions compound and which ones quietly cost you a year.
AI where the stakes are real
This means production, not pilots, and the hard part is getting a team to trust it, use it the same way twice, and stay inside the lines when nobody's watching.
Leading engineering at any scale
From a single squad to a whole technology organization, municipal to international, the standards a team refuses to drop are what scale with it.
Impact in numbers
Care and management ERPs, APIs, apps and citizen portals running the day-to-day of municipal and state health and education services.
Track record
Intern in 2010, then junior developer, tech lead, and for the last eight years software architect. Today I'm Head of Technology at Appolus Tecnologia.
That path made me a full-range engineer, from HTML and CSS to embedded software, with a lot of flight hours in infrastructure between the two. I've built institutional websites, a childcare app in Europe, SAP integrations, APIs for Brazil's national health data network, high-performance search over large medical bases, and systems with 1,200+ tables and 35,000 people logged in daily.
I've always worked inside the problem, not next to it, through audits, outages, migrations and public deadlines that don't move. I'm still here because building something a couple of million people actually use never stopped being a good reason to get up.
On my own time I run GBRLRG, a small studio where I make My Plan Buddy, Tablewit and Jambu, plus Mindminer, where I teach AI in Portuguese.
Away from all that, I'm into good food, the beach, trekking, travel and sun.
What I'm working on
Roughly 90% of my time goes into R&D, the part of the job I'd keep if I had to drop everything else: finding and rolling out what makes the company's teams faster, and not only the technology ones.
Right now that means AI in critical delivery. Every gain is measured before I call it a gain, and so far the numbers have held up.
- AI adoption in critical projects
- AI governance & guardrails
- Team enablement & training
- Process and workflow R&D
- Software architecture
- DevOps culture
How I work
Simple solutions to complex problems. The architecture is whatever serves the outcome best, and I care about the result, the quality, and not wasting the team's time.
I lead teams of 2 to 20 with the same technical depth, and I'm still close to the code, because you can't hold a technical conversation you can't have yourself. I understand the problem, cut it to its essentials, ship it and measure what happened.
I also build for handover from day one, writing decisions down, naming owners, and setting standards a team can hold without me in the room. If the work only works with me in it, it isn't finished.
Toolbox
Ordered by where I carry the most weight today, not by where I started, and it keeps growing from here.
- AI adoption in teams
- AI governance
- Team training
- Usage measurement
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- Docker Swarm
- Portainer
- CI/CD
- DevOps culture
- Ruby on Rails
- Node
- React
- Postgres
- MongoDB
Let's talk
Always up for a good conversation about technology leadership, advisory and board-level questions, AI adoption where the stakes are real, or an international project. If any of that is on your desk, write to me.