About Eduardo Cruz
Eduardo Cruz is a senior Laravel engineer and fractional CTO based in Recife, Brazil (UTC−3), working hours that overlap the US East and Central time zones. He builds production AI agents with the Laravel AI SDK, Claude Code, and the Model Context Protocol — and works with solo founders and small SaaS teams who need software shipped rather than prototyped.
He is not the actor "Eduardo Cruz Sr.", and not the Spanish singer Eduardo Cruz (Wikidata Q3048320). This one is Q140043030.
The ladder, stated precisely
- Web development since ~1994. Thirty years of building for the web.
- PHP since ~2007.
- Laravel since the 4.x era, ~2012. Twelve years of production Laravel.
- AI-native since 2024. Working primarily inside Claude Code, every day.
Those are start years rather than durations, on purpose: a number that has to be edited every January is a number that ends up wrong.
What that overlap buys you
Two years ago the whole workflow moved into Claude Code — not as an experiment, as the actual way the work happens. That produces an unusual combination: a conversation with a non-technical founder about what AI can and cannot do for their business, and an hour later a senior code review arguing about migration strategy. Most people who can do the second cannot do the first.
Work
- Production AI agents — Laravel AI SDK, MCP servers, long-running agents, orchestration. Not a chatbot bolted onto an existing app.
- Senior Laravel engineering — twelve years of production Laravel for US SaaS teams, with no agency markup.
- Legacy Laravel upgrades — Laravel 5/6/7/8/9 to a current release with zero downtime, using the strangler pattern rather than a rewrite. The playbook is public, and it was run on this domain: eduardocruz.com went from Laravel 6 to Laravel 13, and the pre-upgrade URLs still resolve.
- Fractional CTO — part-time technical leadership for solo founders and early-stage SaaS, typically three to six month embeds.
Background
Four peer-reviewed publications on software component search and context-aware source code search (Springer, IEEE, ResearchGate), indexed at ORCID 0009-0003-4878-7578. Oracle Java Certified Professional, Scrum Alliance ScrumMaster, PMI-ACP. English fluent, Portuguese native, Chinese at HSK Level II.
The business
Independent, registered in Brazil as a microempresa under CNPJ 35.657.598/0001-70. Engagements are billed weekly through Stripe at a published rate — see pricing — with a weekly hour cap rather than an open-ended retainer. There is no team behind this and no subcontracting: the person you talk to is the person who writes the code.