Miguel Vilhena

The short version

I'm a fullstack engineer, strongest on the frontend, and I've never much enjoyed inheriting something finished. At IKEA I inherited a one-country pilot instead - thin logic, thin UI - and I've carried it through every market launch since, to thirty countries. Forty years and 200 million members in, it was the first time an IKEA Family card could earn anything at all. Before that I founded and sold two companies. React and Node, GCP and infrastructure as code when it counts - but the front is where I'm sharpest. Most of my attention now goes to AI. I run models on hardware I own and build with agents daily, rebuilding how I work around a simple fact: one engineer can now attempt what used to need a team.

The AI part, in detailHow I chose the models by measuring them, why the agent holds no credential that could push, and the bug I fixed in the inference server everything runs on.

30
countries live: 11
years shipping: 2
companies built and sold

Where I've worked

- Rebuilt the claim and redeem flow - the path every reward in the programme goes through - and took offer claims up sharply.
- Built the launch system the team used to take the whole loyalty programme into every new geography, 30 markets in all. What used to need me now needs a checklist.
- Led the V2 initiative end to end: the micro-frontend rebuild, and the migration onto the upstream's new canonical model through major breaking changes, without dropping a market.
- Started Promotions, a new initiative now live in several countries alongside the loyalty programme, so markets configure their own reward rules instead of queueing for engineering.
- Worked across the stack - Preact and TypeScript on the front, Node, Firestore and GCP behind - and wrote all the architecture decisions down before they got built.
- Freed the business from engineering for copy, translations and experiments by wiring in Phrase, Contentful, Contentsquare and Optimizely, so markets ship and test changes themselves
- Preact
- React
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Node JS
- Express
- REST APIs
- Firestore
- GCP
- Terraform
- Terragrunt
- Git
- GitHub Actions
- Jest
- SCSS
- Contentful
- Optimizely
Visit IKEA

Side projects

The AI Factory

A coding agent on hardware I own, driven from my phone, and a patch merged upstream in the server it runs on

Two model bake-offs measured on the machine rather than taken from a blog post, a sandboxed agent that holds no credential capable of pushing, five gates it has to survive before a task counts as done, and a streaming bug I traced, reported and patched in the inference server itself. The layer that ships what it builds is designed and not built yet, and the case study says so.

Python · MLX · vLLM · Qwen3.6 · macOS · Tailscale · Telegram · Node · Git

Read the case study

PowerByJS

Took a kickboxing coach from Instagram DMs to inbound enquiries from strangers, still live on a CMS I built for him

Research into the gyms outspending him, four personas, a brand identity his photographers and printers still work from, and a bilingual eight-page product with three pricing engines behind it. The site he asked for would not have competed.

React · TypeScript · Vite · Tailwind · Sanity · i18next · Framer Motion · Netlify Functions

Read the case study Visit the site

In their words

Recommendations written on LinkedIn by people I worked with.

Miguel and I worked together on the Rewards Experience, IKEA Family's customer loyalty platform... He cares about security and code auditing... He also made agentic coding tooling a natural part of his workflow, using it deliberately rather than reflexively, which is the harder half of adopting it well.
João SchiasSoftware Engineer, IKEA
Miguel is one of few developers that is not just a person doing something but actively searching to improve it... when he jumps he not just does it but rather creates a way to do things better... All of this plus his brains gives him a impressive awareness to make human and technical changes where they need to be done... People like Miguel are rare.
Marcos MianiPrincipal Engineer, ABN AmroWorked together at Expereo
Working with him enabled us to build an incredibly well-rounded Reward Program for IKEA Family, IKEA's loyalty program... he takes into account both the technical and experiential elements of product delivery. He is every product designer's dream software engineer to work with.
Lodovico MarchesiniSenior Product Designer, IKEA
Miguel always aimed for excellence in his work and made a point of leaving code in a better, more maintainable state than he found it. That kind of ownership isn't common, and it made a real difference to the codebase and to the team around him... He consistently sought to understand the underlying infrastructure and the bigger picture behind the systems he worked on.
Bernardo RodriguesEngineering Manager, IKEA
...he is one of the most talented and dedicated professionals I have ever encountered... He has a deep understanding of technical subjects and is always eager to learn more.
Mehmet RihtimSoftware Development Manager, SITAWorked together at Expereo
Miguel takes ownership of his work and responsibilities, consistently delivering high-quality results on time. He is a natural leader and has the ability to motivate and inspire his team to achieve their goals... his technical expertise in front-end development is impressive.
Ekin BarutLead Software Engineer, Expereo

Read them in full on LinkedIn