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Ricardo Niederberger Cabral

Principal Engineer at Jusbrasil. Over 20 years building software and leading engineering teams, from industrial automation to legal tech.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ricardo Niederberger Cabral

About

I’m a software engineer based in Rio de Janeiro. My work has taken me through legal tech, oil & gas, manufacturing, and open source.

I’ve led teams of more than 20 engineers and managed multimillion-dollar projects. I also created imgSeek, a tool for finding photos using a sketch or another image.

My technical background includes distributed and real-time systems, image search, and connecting enterprise systems.

At Jusbrasil, I work on systems that help people access legal information. Before that, I was CTO at Digesto and built software for industrial plants and laboratories at Chemtech, a Siemens company.

Work Experience

Principal Engineer

Jusbrasil · Full-Time
May 2025 - Present · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Lead engineering work on infrastructure, data processing, and machine learning to help citizens, lawyers, and judges access legal information.

Partner / CTO

Digesto · Full-Time
Sep 2013 - May 2025 · São Paulo, Brazil

Led the technical team and built a legal information database for businesses and organizations handling litigation across Brazil.

Used web crawling, text processing, data engineering, trend analysis, and machine learning to collect and analyze legal data.

Author

imgSeek (Open Source Project) · Founder
Nov 2001 - Mar 2014 · Remote

Created and maintained imgSeek, an open-source photo manager that lets users search with a sketch or sample image. The search uses multiresolution wavelet decomposition to compare images.

Project Manager

Chemtech - a Siemens Company · Full-Time
May 2009 - Oct 2013 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Managed more than 30 software and consulting projects in oil & gas and consumer goods. Led a team of more than 20 engineers and worked with sales to win contracts worth millions in annual revenue.

Head of Engineering Applications

Chemtech - a Siemens Company · Full-Time
Jan 2008 - May 2009 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Led the Engineering Applications Team and managed investments in computer-aided engineering tools, document management, and project management software.

Worked with teams across engineering disciplines to improve workflows and data quality and reduce project risks.

Software Engineer

Chemtech - a Siemens Company · Full-Time
Nov 2004 - Jan 2008 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Built a distributed SCADA system for oil & gas pipelines using Eclipse RCP and OMG DDS, and a cross-platform laboratory control system for high-pressure corrosion studies using XML-RPC.

Built an SMS gateway for Globo.com using JMS and HTTP, and high-traffic J2EE web applications with EJB, AJAX, and Oracle.

Systems Analyst

Electronic Data Systems · Full-Time
Mar 2004 - Dec 2004 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Worked with U.S. teams on Western Union’s money transfer data warehouse. Developed IBM AS/400 applications and improved COBOL systems and transaction summary databases.

Intern

Federal Service For Data Processing (SERPRO) · Internship
Jun 2003 - Apr 2004 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Evaluated open-source content management systems for government use and built websites with Plone. Connected ADABAS databases to Zope frontends, configured Apache-Zope clusters, and added X.509 and LDAP authentication.

Education

MSc, Computer Science

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio)
2004 - 2007

MBA, Project Management

Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV)
2009 - 2010

Courses, Computer Graphics

National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA)
2001 - 2003

BSc, Computer Engineering

Instituto Militar de Engenharia (IME)
2000 - 2004

Skills

  • Software Engineering
  • Machine Learning
  • Distributed Systems
  • Project Management
  • Python, Go, Java

Languages

  • Portuguese – Native
  • English – Fluent

Publications

Blog