I am an data professional. I work with data science, data engineering, data visualization, and LLM/AI.

I’m Rafael Kovashikawa, an economist-turned-data-professional with a soft spot for macro signals, efficient pipelines and making cloud bills disappear.

Always curious about tech, data and dogs.

I will use this space to post about things that I’ve found interesting along the journey and, of course, my projects.

What I do best

  • Data Science & Modeling · Develop and productionize time‑series (ARIMA, VaR), tree‑based and econometric models for CPI forecasts, credit risk and trading signals.
  • Data Engineering · Build and orchestrate ETL on Airflow + Kubernetes.
  • ML in Production · Deploy credit-risk and anomaly-detection models (FastAPI, Docker).
  • LLMs · RAG pipelines for legal doc analysis, LangChain + vector DBs.

Tech Stack

Programming: Python, R, MongoDB, SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML
Data Viz & Analysis: Plotly, Matplotlib, Tableau, Excel, Bloomberg Terminal
Cloud & Automation: AWS, Apache Airflow, GitHub Actions (CI/CD), Google Cloud Platform
ML & AI: scikit‑learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, Econometrics (Statsmodels), LLMs, NLP
Languages: Native Portuguese; fluent English and Spanish

Professional Experience

GYRA+ — Senior Data Scientist
Aug 2024 – Jan 2025 · Brazil

  • Led the strategic re‑architecture of data models and ETL/ELT pipelines (Python, Airflow, AWS), cutting AWS costs for the data team by 50 %.
  • Built a high‑performance simulation API (FastAPI, Polars, MongoDB) deployed on Kubernetes, enabling rapid credit‑portfolio stress testing.
  • Delivered a production‑ready RAG pipeline (LangChain, MongoDB) that extracts and structures key information from legal documents.

JGP Asset Management — Macro Data Scientist
Jan 2021 – Jul 2024 · Brazil

  • Designed LATAM CPI forecasting models and global macro dashboards that out‑sped Bloomberg.
  • Engineered resilient pipelines (Python, SQL, Airflow) to ingest and curate macro datasets for trading research.
  • Developed NLP models to score Brazilian Central Bank communications and integrate sentiment into trading strategies.
  • Automated data workflows, eliminating manual steps and improving data timeliness.

Órama (acquired by BTG Pactual)— Data Analytics
Sep 2019 – Aug 2020

  • Mined client data with Python and SQL, applying NLP and k‑means clustering to improve investment recommendations.

IBM — Data Operations
Apr 2019 – Aug 2019

  • Automated ticket‑management workflows with Python, Selenium, and SQL, eliminating +90% of manual effort

Education

MIT — Data Science & Statistics MicroMasters (edX)
May 2024 – Oct 2025 (expected)

Fundação Getúlio Vargas (EPGE) — B.Sc. Economics
2017 – 2021

Grants & Awards

  • Big Data Hackathon (Sep 2021, XP Inc. & Microsoft Azure) – built a 14 GB big‑data application on Azure.
  • 2nd Place – Cryptocurrency Datathon (Sep 2020, FGV & Ripple) – ML strategies for Bitcoin trading with NLP on news and Reddit.

Outside the terminal

I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 🇧🇷

My favorite things are:

🦮 dogs · 🏃 running · ⚽ Fluminense fan

Benito at sunset Post-run selfie

Need a hand with data problems?
Hit me on LinkedIn or open an issue and let’s chat.