When the 29-year-old Samuel Rizzon is asked what he does, he answers with a single word: “developer.” While accurate, it’s a modest label for someone whose work has stretched well beyond writing code.
At an age when many engineers are still settling into a single specialty, Rizzon has built products embraced by large enterprises, online classrooms, and the open-source community, three arenas that rarely reward the same instincts. His is a story of versatility, of an engineer who has never been willing to be only one thing.
From a bedroom app to a billion documents
Interested in technology and building software from a young age, Rizzon developed and shipped his first product at 19: a Bible quiz he published to the Play Store and the App Store in 2015. It picked up 22,000 downloads, and that response was enough to convince him that making things people actually used was worth pursuing. Not long after, he joined TOTVS, Brazil’s largest technology company, where he would spend the next five years and lay the foundation of his career.
That foundation took shape around a single product. It started as a proof of concept for one client that wanted a way to sign documents digitally. Rizzon wrote it from scratch, and the prototype worked well enough to become a product in its own right. It grew into a standalone electronic signature platform comparable to DocuSign, and today it processes more than a billion documents for over a million customers.
