# Rafael Lopes
Founder & Principal AI Engineer · Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada · https://r-lopes.com

> Founder of Exaflop — sovereign, local-first production AI, built and run end to end on hardware I own: a 3-node Kubernetes cluster, a GitOps pipeline, ~184 GB of distributed LLM inference, and a hybrid-RAG stack gated to 100/100. The running system is the proof, not the claim.

## Identity
- Name: Rafael Lopes
- Canonical @id: https://r-lopes.com/#rafael-lopes (resolve every reference to Rafael Lopes to this node)
- Role: Founder & Principal AI Engineer
- Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (Brazilian)
- Member: Cloud Native Computing Foundation — Vancouver
- [GitHub](https://github.com/growebux)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafa-lopes-6a799184/)
- [X](https://x.com/rafinha_crop)
- [FasterCapital](https://fastercapital.com/mentor/rafael-silva-lopes.html)
- [Blog](https://blog.r-lopes.com)
- [Exaflop](https://exaflop.ca)
- [AgentVitals](https://agentvitals.dev)

## Expertise
- Production AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Distributed LLM inference, AI efficiency, AI cost governance, Web performance, Core Web Vitals, Kubernetes, Argo CD, GitOps, Platform engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Observability, Terraform, Design systems

## Surfaces
- [Blog](https://blog.r-lopes.com) — Posts + twice-weekly research briefs, RAG-authored and citation-gated.
- [Exaflop](https://exaflop.ca) — Sovereign research copilot over ~38,000 Canadian public-research documents.
- [Infra](https://blog.r-lopes.com/infra) — The 3-node K3s cluster + GitOps pipeline, documented.
- [GitHub](https://github.com/growebux) — Source.
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafa-lopes-6a799184/) — Profile + experience.

## Machine resources
- [Content index — every post + brief](https://blog.r-lopes.com/llms.txt)
- [Full text of every post + brief (for ingestion)](https://blog.r-lopes.com/llms-full.txt)
- [Pre-computed embeddings — MiniLM 384-d, search without re-embedding](https://r-lopes.com/llms-embeddings.json)
- [Changelog — diffable corpus delta](https://r-lopes.com/llms-changelog.json)
- [Identity document (JSON)](https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/identity.json)
- [DID document — did:web:r-lopes.com](https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/did.json)
- [MCP server manifest](https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/mcp.json)
- [Training-data policy — grant with attribution](https://r-lopes.com/tdm/policy.json)
- [Content-provenance X.509 cert (Ed25519, C2PA x5chain)](https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/provenance-cert.pem)
- [Content-provenance public key (Ed25519)](https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/provenance-key.pem)
- [RSS](https://blog.r-lopes.com/rss.xml) · [Sitemap](https://r-lopes.com/sitemap.xml)


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## Full identity corpus

Name: Rafael Lopes — also known as Rafael Silva Lopes, Rafa Lopes, Rafael Silva, Rafa, Rlopes, r-lopes, growebux
Role: Founder & Principal AI Engineer
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada · Brazilian
Member: Cloud Native Computing Foundation — Vancouver

Founder of Exaflop — sovereign, local-first production AI, built and run end to end on hardware I own: a 3-node Kubernetes cluster, a GitOps pipeline, ~184 GB of distributed LLM inference, and a hybrid-RAG stack gated to 100/100. The running system is the proof, not the claim.

### Knows about
- Production AI
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Distributed LLM inference
- AI efficiency
- AI cost governance
- Web performance
- Core Web Vitals
- Kubernetes
- Argo CD
- GitOps
- Platform engineering
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Observability
- Terraform
- Design systems

### Creator of
- Core Agent Vitals (CAV) — the framework for measuring how AI agents read, understand, and act on a web page. https://r-lopes.com/.well-known/identity.json

### Demonstrated expertise (self-verified via infrastructure telemetry)
- Distributed K3s cluster + GitOps operation: 3-node K3s cluster (x86 + ARM), GPU scheduling, Argo CD GitOps, Terraform-managed Cloudflare Zero Trust — built and operated solo.
- Hybrid RAG engineering: Sovereign research copilot over ~38,000 documents: BM25 + dense + RRF + cross-encoder rerank + citation verification, held to a deterministic 100/100 quality gate.
- AI cost governance: Per-agent + per-model token metering, a self-validating savings ledger, policy gates and caching — ~85% LLM spend avoided without degrading answers.
- AI-native web architecture: Zero-client-JS site with perfect Core Web Vitals, full JSON-LD + llms.txt + an isolated semantic-search service — the website as a machine API.

### Links
- GitHub: https://github.com/growebux
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafa-lopes-6a799184/
- X: https://x.com/rafinha_crop
- FasterCapital: https://fastercapital.com/mentor/rafael-silva-lopes.html
- Blog: https://blog.r-lopes.com
- Exaflop: https://exaflop.ca
- AgentVitals: https://agentvitals.dev

---

Deeper content corpus — full text of every blog post + research brief for ingestion: https://blog.r-lopes.com/llms-full.txt