Pure merit. Ethical rigor. Peer evaluation.

With over twenty years of experience as an operator, engineering executive, and tech founder, Rui Andrade Barreira serves as Vice President of Engineering at kununu (Burda Group), leading distributed engineering, cybersecurity, and company-wide AI enablement under the EU AI Act framework. He holds a Computer Science degree from FCUP and a Master of Science in Software Engineering from FEUP (University of Porto), combining academic rigor with large-scale systems execution.

In the entrepreneurial ecosystem, he was Co-Founder and CEO of motel.io—raising venture funding and securing granted patents in the United States and Europe—served as VP of Technology at US scale-up VIZpin, and was Chief Digital Officer at Critical Software. He advises AI and computer vision startups (including Neadvance and Replai), bridging lab discoveries with scalable industrial and clinical products.

Dedicated to social impact and tech education, he co-founded the .SWitCH() career-conversion program (Porto Tech Hub)—reskilling hundreds of professionals for tech careers—and sits on the Board of ENSICO, Portugal’s leading K-12 computing education initiative, alongside board mandates on the General Council of ISG Business School and the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Within BolsaLAB, he architected the open 0% overhead framework, ensuring 100% of mobilized funding directly reaches cancer researchers.