Leonardo Rocha

Senior AI Engineer with 12+ years in R&D and 6+ years building and deploying production AI systems.

Specialized in Generative AI and Agentic Systems — including RAG architectures and robust evaluation frameworks.

Hands-on experience delivering cloud-native AI architectures for real-world workflow automation across on-premises and cloud environments.

Key Highlights

AI Robotic Agent — Attorney General’s Office of Ceará
95%+ success rate · 40% workload reduction · 400+ hours/month saved

Led the full-cycle design and deployment of an AWS-based agentic system automating legal workflows across 10,000+ monthly cases. Ran containerized, long-running workers on Amazon EKS, consumed demand via Amazon SQS, used Amazon RDS as system-of-record, stored & searched embeddings in Amazon OpenSearch, and monitored operations with Amazon CloudWatch. Achieved >95% success rate with human validation.

Adaptive Learning Platform — IREDE Institute
5,000+ students · +10% retention

Designed and implemented adaptive learning and recommendation engines using semantic embeddings and graph-based modeling, powering a national ICT training platform and improving learner engagement and completion rates.

AI Startup Mentor — Multi-Agent Conversational Intelligence
4 expert personas · LangGraph orchestration · RAG-grounded reasoning

Built a multi-agent conversational platform that simulates expert panels (CTO, PM, VC) to mentor startup founders. Agents collaborate through LangGraph orchestration and RAG-based contextual grounding, ensuring coherent, knowledge-driven dialogue. Deployed with FastAPI and Google Cloud Run for scalable interaction.

Moena.ai — Reinforcement Learning for Fintech Personalization
Consulting · US / Brazil (Remote)

Consulted a US fintech startup on RL-based customer personalization and feasibility assessment. Participated in joint technical and strategic discussions with stakeholders from Stone and C6 Bank to define architecture options, data requirements, risk profile, and cost structure.

Malicious Site Detection via Graph ML
93% accuracy · Graph Neural Networks

Developed an intelligent cybersecurity module using graph-based machine learning to detect malicious websites through relational analysis of URLs, domains, and host networks. Results were peer-reviewed and published at the 37th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2023).

SofIA Tech — Academic Spin-off and AI Consulting
Founder · Applied AI Training and Solutions

Founded SofIA Tech, bridging state-of-the-art AI research with market applications through consulting, automation projects, and enterprise AI training. Delivered solutions using LLMs, RAG, and intelligent automation frameworks.

LAGIC & IncubaUECE — AI Research and Innovation Ecosystem
20+ supervised projects · 30+ startups supported

Founded the Graph and Computational Intelligence Lab (LAGIC) and coordinated the IncubaUECE incubator, fostering applied AI research, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship in deep-tech ventures across Ceará.

About

Senior AI Engineer with 12+ years in R&D and 6+ years building and deploying intelligent systems. Specialized in agent-based architectures for real-world workflow automation. Proven ability to design maintainable, scalable AI systems, lead end-to-end projects, and deliver 40%+ efficiency gains in production. Strong hands-on experience delivering production-grade, well-architected AI services in on-premises and cloud environments.

Experience

Senior AI Engineer — Attorney General's Office of Ceará
Nov 2023 — Dec 2025 · Ceará, Brazil

Led design and deployment of an AWS-based agentic system automating legal workflows. Achieved >90% accuracy in key tasks, 98.7% dispatch approval without human revision, and >40% productivity gains.

Consultant – AI Research Engineer — Moena.ai
Mar 2025 — Jul 2025 · Remote (US)

Consulted on an RL-based customer personalization approach. Defined technical architecture, mapped requirements, and evaluated infrastructure, costs, and risks with stakeholders, including Stone and C6 Bank.

AI Engineer — IREDE Institute
Sep 2022 — Mar 2024 · Ceará, Brazil

Led design and implementation of adaptive learning features for a national ICT training platform (5,000+ students). Built recommendation engine with strong results in human-supervised evaluations.

Associate Professor — State University of Ceará
May 2013 — Dec 2025 · Ceará, Brazil

Led R&D in Data Science and AI. Supervised 20+ projects, published 20+ peer-reviewed papers, coordinated IncubaUECE, and founded the Graph and Computational Intelligence Lab (LAGIC).

Skills

Cloud (AWS / GCP)
AWS Bedrock Amazon EKS Amazon SQS Amazon RDS Amazon OpenSearch Amazon S3 Amazon CloudWatch IAM VPC GCP Cloud Run Vertex AI GCS
Agentic Systems
Agentic workflows Multi-agent orchestration Tool / function calling Conversational memory Prompt & context engineering Structured outputs (Pydantic) Deterministic guardrails Fallback logic Evaluation frameworks
LLMs & Providers
OpenAI Google Gemini Anthropic Claude Amazon Nova Mistral Gemma Qwen Llama SLMs
RAG & Vector Search
Embeddings Chunking strategies Hybrid retrieval Reranking Retrieval evaluation OpenSearch vector Pinecone Weaviate FAISS ChromaDB
Machine Learning
PyTorch Scikit-learn Transformers (HF) Recommender systems Predictive modeling Feature engineering Fine-tuning Graph ML NLP
Engineering & MLOps
Python SQL FastAPI Flask Docker CI/CD Linux Git Airflow MLflow Triton Inference Server

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Jan 2026 · View credential
AWS Certified AI Practitioner
Jan 2026 · View credential
Machine Learning with Graphs — Stanford University
Dec 2022 · View credential

Education

PhD, Computer Science — University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France
2009 — 2012
Master, Computer Science — Federal University of Ceará, Brazil
2007 — 2009
Bachelor, Computer Science — Federal University of Ceará, Brazil
2003 — 2006

Get in Touch

Prefer email? Reach me directly.

lsampaiorocha [at] gmail [dot] com