Ran a thirty-person engineering org. Still in the codebase.

Modernizing commerce for the AI era

Forward deployed: I work inside the client's codebase, on their runtime, to their release schedule. US commerce brands on Shopify Hydrogen — headless storefronts, where the architecture rather than the theme is the product.

The direction of the work is modernization for what's arriving. Storefronts are beginning to be read and used by AI agents, not only by people, and that changes what a commerce platform has to be good at: structured product data, clean APIs, catalog quality, measurement a decision can actually rest on. Less novel than it sounds — it is infrastructure work, and most of the industry is early in it.

Underneath sits the ordinary modernization job, which is most of the week: re-platforming onto Hydrogen, migrating customer accounts and authentication, moving loyalty between providers without losing member state, search and discovery, performance, product information. Nearly all of it happens under live traffic, so the constraint is rarely the feature — it is shipping without disturbing what already earns.

A good share of the value is upstream of code: technical discovery, vendor evaluation, and giving a client a defensible reason to prefer one architecture over another. On a Hydrogen re-platform I built the QA infrastructure from scratch — scattered requirements consolidated into roughly 585 test cases across eight groups, run across multiple environments by teams from four organizations. External teams were still using it months after I moved off the engagement.

One of twelve, then leading thirty

I joined as the CTO's first hire — one engineer among about twelve in technology, with the CTO running all of it. What I inherited wasn't a team, it was a codebase: the previous backend developer had pushed two refactors through in under a year and left it worse than he found it.

I hired most of the backend team before I had the title to lead it — not promoted into an existing team; the team formed around the hiring and the title followed. It reached about thirty over that stretch. Head of Engineering came after: one of two heads under the CTO, running those thirty across backend, frontend, QA, automation and infrastructure inside a technology org of about fifty — data was the other head's. All of it while the company went from 35 people to 180, through a Series A led by Quona Capital and on into a Series B.

Two systems I conceived and led are still the spine of the product: the commissions-and-payments module that pays thousands of independent bankers every year, and the document platform that ingests 40,000+ documents a month. The real-estate credit flow I built runs R$100M+ a year. Underneath all of it: single server to Kubernetes, thousands of Lambdas, and integrations with Santander, Itaú, Bradesco and a dozen fintechs — most of which had no real API, so we built one for them.

The people record is the part I would point to: two hundred interviews, fifty hires, six engineers grown into leadership roles — including the one who took the job after me. Turnover was among the lowest in the company.

The exit was deliberate rather than abrupt. Through 2025 I reduced hours and handed the org to the engineer I had coached into the role, with Form Factory already primary, and was formally out in January 2026.

Engineer to team lead inside a year

An international agency handed me a team of ten inside a year. We built a fintech marketplace from scratch that closed $2M+ in deals, cut 79% off its core process — fifty thousand runs a year, thousands of hours of it — and moved releases from three a month to four a week.

I also inherited a client relationship that was going badly and turned it around. Of everything from those two years, that is the skill that transferred furthest.

Eleven years of engineering school

Mechatronics at CEFET-MG, starting at fourteen, through to a master's in engineering design at UFSC. In between, Seoul: a research year at Seoul National University building a wearable exoskeleton to help disabled patients eat, and an internship at Hyundai MOBIS.

Robotics trains you to think in systems and forces — what carries load and what only appears to. That habit transferred directly to software architecture.