About me

I'm the Chief Design Officer at Nubank, one of the world's largest digital financial services platforms, where I lead the global design strategy across all product lines and help shape the company's customer experience as we expand across Latin America and beyond. I report directly to our founder and CEO, and I work closely with product, engineering, and marketing leaders to deliver human‑centered digital banking at scale.

Over more than two decades, I've had the chance to build products and teams at Adobe, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Slack, and now Nubank. My work has focused on combining solid craft with resilient systems and clear strategy so that complex technology feels simple and trustworthy to the people who use it.

I began my career at Adobe, where I spent nine years working on Creative Cloud, digital imaging, and related platforms. During that time I contributed to the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud, helping move the company from a boxed‑software model to a subscription‑based service that reshaped how creative professionals access the tools they rely on. Those years grounded me in a rigorous critique culture and sparked a lasting interest in the link between product experience and business model design.

At Google, I led global design for Commerce UX, including work on Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Shopping, and early versions of Google Travel. That role let me blend a long‑standing passion for search and information retrieval with multi‑sided marketplaces, matching people with products, businesses, flights, and destinations in ways that made it easier for people to discover options, plan trips, and pursue the experiences they care about most.

I later joined Uber as a Director of Design, where I led a global team of more than 180 designers, researchers, and creatives responsible for rider, driver, and delivery experiences. In a period of intense growth, our teams helped define the interaction patterns, visual language, and service flows that made on‑demand transportation and food delivery feel fast and dependable in cities around the world.

At Airbnb, I served in dual roles as Global Design Director for the Homes business and General Manager of the Guest team. There I combined design leadership with P&L responsibility, shaping the end‑to‑end experience for hosts and guests while directly owning business outcomes. That experience deepened my conviction that design is most effective when it is accountable for both emotional resonance and concrete results.

From 2020 to 2025, I was Senior Vice President of Design at Slack, overseeing the evolution of a platform that had become foundational to the digital workplace for millions of people. I led the design organization through major product and platform changes, including Slack's integration into Salesforce, with a focus on keeping the experience fast, legible, and human even as it became more powerful and extensible.

In 2025, I joined Nubank as its inaugural Chief Design Officer. In addition to leading the Design function, I play a central role in a cross‑functional group responsible for Nubank's core app experience, mobile architecture, and growth systems. My focus here is to raise the bar for quality, coherence, and performance across our products while embedding design more deeply in strategic decisions.

I studied philosophy at Pomona College, which gave me a habit of looking for underlying assumptions and first principles, and later completed a master's degree in Information Science at the University of California, Berkeley. That combination of humanistic training and systems‑oriented graduate work continues to shape how I think about products, organizations, and technology.

My philosophy of design starts from the belief that design is not surface decoration but the fundamental soul of a human‑made creation, expressed through every layer of a product or service—from business model and architecture to interface and tone of voice. I see that "soul" in small details like a loading state or animation, and also in larger structures like how a financial app organizes information or how an ecosystem of tools fits together in someone's daily life.

I often think about design maturity as an interplay of strategy, systems, and craft. Strategy keeps teams focused on the right problems and connects their work to clear outcomes. Systems provide the frameworks, tools, and operating models that make good decisions repeatable instead of accidental. Craft gives products their emotional power and sense of care, turning something that merely works into something people can actually enjoy and rely on.

In my own working style, I try to be a "strategy‑plus‑execution" leader: I care about ambitious visions, but I only really trust them once they are wired into concrete organizations, roadmaps, and rituals that ship real things. I try to be data‑informed rather than data‑driven, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative research and direct exposure to customer behavior when making important decisions.

I'm drawn to fixing broken or underperforming systems. Whether the context is a legacy app architecture, an under‑powered design function, or a confusing operating model, I tend to reframe issues as design problems at the level of structure, incentives, and interfaces. That work usually starts with listening, careful diagnosis, and a willingness to adjust when the evidence contradicts my initial assumptions.

Culturally, I put a lot of weight on the idea that we are all peers before the object. Titles and seniority matter less than the quality and integrity of the thing we are building together. I'm willing to take clear positions and push for decisions when stakes are high, but I rely on honest critique and dissent to avoid creating a culture of agreement for its own sake. My aim is to help build organizations where high standards and psychological safety reinforce each other: people are expected to care deeply about the work, and also to challenge the work—including my own.

In the current wave of AI, I'm an advocate for AI‑first design and for designers being closer to the act of building. I'm particularly excited about workflows where designers and engineers collaborate through tools like Cursor and GitHub to create live prototypes, then use those prototypes as the primary way to explore ideas, gather feedback, and iterate quickly. To me, AI is not just another feature; it is an opportunity to modernize how products are imagined, assembled, and evolved.

Outside of work, my life is anchored by my family and a few tactile, slow crafts that balance the pace of the technology world.

I'm a father of two, and much of my free time revolves around family: travel, everyday rituals, and helping my kids develop their own curiosity and resilience. That perspective shapes how I think about work: at its best, what we build should create long‑term opportunity and reduce anxiety for real people, not just optimize short‑term metrics.

I also played football all the way through college, and that experience still colors how I think about teams. Being part of a squad where every role matters, learning to accept coaching, giving and receiving direct feedback, and adjusting game plans in real time all taught me a lot about trust, accountability, and shared ownership. Those lessons show up in how I approach team‑building, dynamics, and coaching in design and product organizations today.

As an amateur ceramicist, I'm drawn to the process of turning raw clay into functional objects through a sequence of small, irreversible decisions. Ceramics offers a direct experience of craft, gravity, and failure that is hard to replicate in software. The medium rewards patience, attention, and a willingness to start over—qualities I try to bring into product work as well.

I'm also a beekeeper, which reinforces my fascination with systems, emergence, and care over long time horizons. A healthy hive can't be micromanaged; it has to be supported through the right conditions, protections, and interventions at the right moments. I often draw quiet parallels between tending a hive and leading large, distributed teams: in both cases, the goal is less about controlling every action and more about creating an environment where complex, adaptive work can flourish.

Taken together, these passions—family, football, ceramics, beekeeping—reflect a throughline in my life: a belief that meaningful work sits at the intersection of craft, systems, and care for other people, and that the things we design, whether digital or physical, should leave the world a little more coherent and humane than we found it.