# Renan Butkeraites

**Engineering leader · Optimization specialist** · Kennesaw, GA, US · Remote, global

Engineering leader with a PhD in Operations Research and 7+ years building Python backends, AI/LLM products, and decision-support systems — from mathematical model to production.

- Email: rbritobut@gmail.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/butkeraites
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbritobut
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Zh48TgYAAAAJ
- ORCID: 0000-0002-5830-0466

## Selected work

### Vehicle routing engine for Brazil's largest sugar producer

*Nitryx → Progress Rail · A Caterpillar Company*

Designed and led a Python optimization engine for fleet routing across 40k+ locations — started at Nitryx, carried through Progress Rail's acquisition, and taken from concept to production-ready in 16 months with a team of 6.

**Outcome:** −20% fleet size · $60K/month cloud savings via in-house Distance Matrix APIs

### Client-facing exports platform for transit operators on 3 continents

*Optibus · Public Transit SaaS*

Led a 5-developer team owning report generation and integrations for clients across North America, Latin America, and Western Europe — including real-time transportation map feeds.

**Outcome:** −50% new bugs · 2× team development velocity · key contract secured

### SIROM — a robust optimization method under uncertainty

*PhD Research · UNIFESP + Polytechnique Montréal*

Created a sampling-based multi-objective iterative method for optimization under uncertainty, plus "Hardness", a new robustness measure. Co-authored with Michel Gendreau.

**Outcome:** Outperformed or matched literature methods in 92.5% of Bandwidth Packing cases

### Behavioral models that moved acquisition and engagement

*Banco Safra · Banking*

Built a Markov-chain model of app user behavior to retarget communication, and executive-level analyses that pivoted credit policy and marketing. Led fraud-pattern analysis on PIX instant payments.

**Outcome:** +15% app activation · +45% high-quality credit card leads

### From 5-day to 5-minute model deployments

*Porto Seguro · Insurance*

Started the company's movement toward API-based models and AWS cloud computing, and shipped a freight-size estimation heuristic used in logistics planning.

**Outcome:** Deployment time: 5 days → 5 minutes · 20% logistics optimization

### Forecast UTI — ICU bed forecasting during the pandemic

*Public Health · COVID-19*

Co-built an application forecasting intensive-care bed demand for Brazilian health services during COVID-19, published in a national epidemiology journal. Also open-sourced a classroom-occupancy optimizer for safe school distancing.

**Outcome:** Published in Epidemiologia e Serviços de Saúde (2020)

## Experience

### Information Technology Manager · SG Global Group

*2026 — present*

Leading IT operations and technology strategy for SG LAW LLP (Kennesaw, GA): LLM-powered legal solutions for research, contract review, and document analysis; governance of confidential legal datasets (anonymization, redaction, privacy compliance); cybersecurity across AI systems; firm-wide AI adoption and training.

### Director of Technology · Fresh Codes

*2025 — present*

End-to-end backend engineering for AI-driven product development: distributed cloud architectures (AWS, Azure), high-throughput data pipelines, LLM-powered ML models. Mentoring a fully remote team of 4+ engineers.

### Technical Lead · Serendipe Institute of Science & Technology

*2025 — 2026*

Drove the institute's technical strategy and R&D execution; project prospecting, technical hiring, and mentoring of engineers and researchers.

### Founder & CEO · BSI — AI & Optimization Consulting (closed)

*2024 — 2026*

Founded and led a consulting firm in Campinas, Brazil, crafting bespoke AI strategies and optimization solutions for clients; operations closed in January 2026.

### Integration Consultant, Backend Python · hotglue

*2024 — 2025*

Designed and implemented custom data-integration solutions on hotglue's embedded ETL platform.

### Backend Python Team Lead · Optibus

*2022 — 2024*

Led the customer-oriented R&D team for specialized exports; pair-programming culture, knowledge-sharing initiatives ("Optifridays"), technical interviewing during rapid company growth.

### Researcher, Optimization · Nitryx Consulting → Progress Rail (Caterpillar)

*2021 — 2022*

Started the vehicle-routing optimization engine at Nitryx and carried it into Progress Rail after the acquisition — leading a team of 6 from conception to production-ready in 16 months, with Distance Matrix APIs and six real-time integrations.

### Data Science Specialist · Banco Safra

*2020 — 2021*

Mixed Media Models, Markov-chain behavior models, PIX fraud-pattern detection, executive-level analytics.

### Senior Data Scientist · Porto Seguro

*2019 — 2020*

API-based model serving on AWS; optimization heuristics for logistics; ML with XGBoost, scikit-learn, Gurobi/CPLEX.

### Mathematical Analyst · UniSoma

*2018 — 2019*

Column-generation scheduling with CPLEX for railroad workforce planning; real-time Big Data (Kafka, PySpark) NLP fraud detection.

### Research Intern · CIRRELT — Polytechnique Montréal

*2018*

Optimization under uncertainty, supervised by Prof. Michel Gendreau.

### PhD Candidate, Operations Research · UNIFESP / ITA (CNPq fellow)

*2016 — 2021*

Thesis: "Optimization under uncertainty: a new computational method, a new robustness measure, and applications."

## Publications

- Renan Brito Cano Butkeraites, Luiz Leduino de Salles Neto, Michel Gendreau, "A sampling-based multi-objective iterative robust optimization method for the Bandwidth Packing Problem", Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 203, 117337, 2022. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2022.117337
- Luiz Leduino de Salles Neto, Renan Brito Cano Butkeraites, Martins, Chaves, Horacio Hideki Yanasse, "Forecast UTI: an application for forecasting intensive care unit beds during the COVID-19 pandemic", Epidemiologia e Serviços de Saúde, 2020.
- Renan Brito Cano Butkeraites, José Luiz Chela, Luiz Leduino de Salles Neto, "Efficient frontier of credit risk using Monte Carlo simulation", International Journal of Business Intelligence and Systems Engineering, 2019.
- Renan Brito Cano Butkeraites, "Optimization under uncertainty: a new computational method, a new robustness measure, and applications", UNIFESP, 2021. (Advisors: L. L. Salles Neto & W. A. Lodwick)

## Open work

- **SIROM**: A sampling-based method that hands you a Pareto frontier of robust solutions and lets you choose the trade-off after seeing the options, instead of committing to an uncertainty budget before you know what it costs. — https://github.com/butkeraites/sirom
- **Hardness**: A continuous, normalized robustness measure for optimization under interval uncertainty — one number in [0,1] that ranks feasible solutions by how well they resist the uncertainty around them, with an exact closed form and a Monte-Carlo estimator that agree. — https://github.com/butkeraites/hardness
- **Anatomy of a Failed Anneal**: A public repository of mine contains 201 committed simulated-annealing runs, every one of them infeasible. This takes the failure apart, isolates its three causes, and reaches a few percent of the proven optimum in milliseconds. — https://github.com/butkeraites/simulated-annealing
- **The N=32 Wall**: A verified database of Costas arrays for orders 2–100, algebraic generators built over finite fields, and CP/SAT/LP experiments against the smallest orders where nobody has ever found one — or proved none exists. — https://github.com/butkeraites/costas-array

## About

I started as a **mechatronics technician** maintaining flight simulators, and ended up with a **PhD in Operations Research** — because I kept asking how decisions could be made better under uncertainty. Along the way I did research with Michel Gendreau in Montréal, published the SIROM method, and created "Hardness", a new way to measure how robust a solution really is.

Since then I've applied that lens in insurance, banking, rail logistics, public transit, and data platforms: always the same job, **turning a messy real-world decision into a model, and the model into production software**. I've led teams through that whole arc — hiring, mentoring, pair programming, and shipping.

Today I manage technology for **SG Global Group** in Kennesaw, Georgia — leading legal AI and LLM initiatives for SG LAW LLP — while directing technology at **Fresh Codes**, an AI-driven product studio, with remote teams and global clients. Off the clock: mathematical puzzles, good food, and music — sometimes all three while putting my daughter to sleep.