# 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)