I made it to CTO. It was never about the title.

I've been in technology for 30 years. I started as a founder: I built Conecta, a licensed telecom carrier, and spent 15 years taking it from an NGN VoIP core to a running operation — dealing with everything that comes with owning the whole problem: network, regulation, cash, team. Then I moved to the other side of the table: architecture and engineering leadership at Accenture, AWS, and Sysmap, and finally CTO at Aarin, a Bradesco-affiliated fintech under Central Bank (BACEN) supervision, where every technical decision is also a risk and a cash-flow decision.

In practice that meant leading an engineering org of ~100 people, a budget in the seven figures a year, and platforms processing millions of transactions a day in a BACEN-regulated environment (PIX, BaaS, ledger). I cut infrastructure cost by about 30% and gained roughly 20% in engineering productivity by pulling AI adoption into the actual workflow — not as a showcase.

What changed in 10 years? I learned to decide with data and explicit tradeoffs, not slideware. I build small, dense teams. I'm skeptical of "digital transformation" as a narrative, and I trust people solving real business problems. And I learned to translate in both directions: carrying a technical decision to the board without losing the substance, and carrying business context to a junior engineer without outsourcing the understanding. Both sides have to get it. That's the job.

These days I choose my next step instead of accepting it. What matters is the right problem, with people who know what they're doing.