About Me

Cláudio Gonçalves · IT Solutions Architect

“Someone that makes a bridge from the business need and transforms it into tech, and vice versa. Someone to pick up the output and transform it into outcome, IT-wise.”

Professional Background

I got into IT at the end of 1999, at a company called Grupo ECIL in Luanda, with no formal knowledge of computing at all — just curiosity, and someone already working there who put my name forward. I started as the shadow of a technician who was already on the team. The network still ran on coax rather than RJ45, the machines ran Windows 95 in workgroups, and part of the job was assembling the computers the company sold — Linha Branca, we called them, cheaper than buying one already built.

In 2004 I saw an advertisement in the Jornal de Angola: BFA was hiring. The first stage was a psychometric test at Universidade Lusíada; more than six hundred people sat it and I came out among the first thirty. They called the same day and the interviews started the next. Then the IT vacancies filled before they could place me, so I spent about six months at a commercial branch in Prenda, counting money in treasury and working the teller window, still asking to be moved. A new bank, BIC, opened and drew a lot of BFA people away, and that is what finally freed a seat for me in IT. Desktop Support, then IT Operations, then System Administrator. The thing I am still proudest of from those years is small and practical: BFA was opening branches fast, so I proposed building a network that mimicked the branch about to open, preparing and cloning the servers and workstations there, then boxing the equipment back up and shipping it ready — to cut the deployment time on site. That idea was mine alone, and it was adopted.

I left BFA in 2010 because I was repeating my job a lot and I wanted to evolve. A friend told me about a consultant opening at Menshen, and the three years that followed were a rotation rather than a post: coordinating a desktop support team at Cobalt, covering a colleague's System Administrator role at TAAG while he was on holiday, System Administrator and coordinator at Ridge Solutions — and back and forth to Angola LNG for one assignment after another. Angola LNG was separating from Chevron's systems then and had to build its own infrastructure from nothing. I helped stand up the first domain controllers of that new infrastructure and worked the workstation migration: back up the data, install the OS, join the domain, install the applications, restore the user's data.

They liked the work enough to want to hire me directly, and contract conflicts at the time made it impossible. When Angola LNG opened a hiring round for a new group of System Administrators in 2013, I applied alongside everyone else and was contracted. Most of my intake went to Soyo; I stayed in Luanda. It was not a cold start — I had been inside those systems as an outsider for about three years already. Five years as Server Administrator followed, closing with a large Microsoft programme in 2017 that took us off Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 and onto 2016.

In September 2018 a department town hall announced a new team, Strategic Planning and Projects. The Architect position moved into it and I was named to fill it. I want to be accurate about how that happened: I did not apply and I did not win it. It came out of a company-wide restructuring, in a year when oil companies here and elsewhere were laying off a great many people. A teammate had been preparing for the role. I was assigned. It was not fair to him. What I felt was anxiety, not pride. My goal at the time had been to move into security, not architecture, and I did not feel I fitted the role I had been handed. I knew very little about what it actually required, and I was lost for some time.

That settled slowly. One document I still have a copy of, with my name on it as author, is a service-level agreement for an identity platform, from 2020. My profile has described me for a while as being in transition toward enterprise architecture, and the honest version of that in 2026 is this: there is no new title and there is no transition plan. What there is, is the work. I organised an enterprise-architecture masterclass in 2025. Since then I have written the architecture review process the company runs on, stood up the board that reviews designs before they get built, and drafted the principles underneath it, mapped to TOGAF, COBIT and ITIL. I own the checklists we use to assess an architecture and to bring a new vendor on. And my manager has set me goals I am formally accountable for: architecture reviews, signed assessments across the solutions we have deployed, an inventory of how our systems integrate, a target identity architecture, and a log of the decisions behind all of it. The governance work is real and it is under way. The title has not changed, and I would rather say that than dress it up.

Underneath all of it there is one constant, and it is not ambition. I am lazy about repetition. If I have to do the same thing twice I go looking for a way to make it faster and more efficient, and most of what I have built in more than twenty-five years started there.

Years in IT

25+

Years at Angola LNG

13

Years as Architect

8

Bilingual: Portuguese (native) · English (professional)