If you worked with me ten years ago, you probably remember me as the design guy. That makes sense: I spent a good part of my career designing products and leading design teams, at Semantix and at Wildlife Studios. Today I lead engineering. I’m head of Trust & Safety engineering at GamerSafer, an American company.
From the outside, it looks like a sudden turn. From the inside, it was a path where code was always close by and, little by little, moved to the center.
Code was always there
I started in 2006 as an information architect, designing websites for advertising agencies. In 2010 I founded Avelã, software that automated the patient journey for healthcare professionals. In a small company there’s no such thing as “not my job”: I took care of the product, the design, the operations and whatever else was needed. That’s where an SMS appointment reminder cut no-shows from 30% to 7%, and I learned that the solution that works isn’t always the most sophisticated one.
At Semantix, I was the first product designer, when the company had 35 people. I built the design team and, alongside it, the front-end engineering team. At Gama Academy, I joined as a developer for four months: I launched the new website and integrated the learning platform with a financing API. At Wildlife, I was the first designer in the engineering department, designing the internal tools that run the games.
At Moxen, the second company I founded, a live commerce app, I led product, design and engineering. I designed a lot of it straight in code, adjusting after each live auction based on feedback from the people who had bought and sold.
When engineering became the center
After Moxen, I went to Grupo H2. I joined as a designer and, because I understood metrics and the business, became a product manager, in charge of growth and gamification. On the side, I started writing the front end of a product for an American company. That’s when I realized where I made the most difference, and the people around me realized it too.
In March 2026, I took over Trust & Safety engineering at GamerSafer. Today I’m responsible for the platform’s security and stability: I built the security program, wrote the production standard every repository follows and taught the team to build with artificial intelligence.
What AI changed
When I arrived, using AI to write code wasn’t part of the team’s routine. Now it is, and a good part of my work was creating the workflows for it: opening tasks, reviewing code, triaging security alerts.
AI made writing code much cheaper. It didn’t make reliable code any cheaper.
Knowing whether a change breaks what already worked, whether the data is protected, whether someone finds out about an error before the customer complains: that is still work for people. And it’s the work I enjoy most today.
What I brought from design
I didn’t leave design behind. It came along, and it shows up in at least three things.
The first is starting with the person. Before asking whether it works, I ask who it’s for and whether it solves their problem. Engineering that forgets this delivers well-built systems that nobody uses.
The second is giving shape to what’s confusing. Information architecture and systems architecture have more in common than it seems: in both, the work is deciding what goes together, what stays apart and how someone new will find their way around.
The third is leading people. I built design teams at Semantix and at Wildlife, one of them with 11 designers, and what I learned there (hiring, giving feedback, setting up routines) applies just the same to engineering teams.
The whole product
If you remember me as the design guy, you’re not wrong. You’re just missing the other half. Today I look at the whole product: the business, the user, the design, the code and what happens after launch. After 20 years, it’s what I do best, and it’s what I want to write about here.