My Career Makes More Sense Backwards

If you read my résumé the way it's written — control engineering, then construction, then process engineering in Germany, then technology scouting, then a consumer venture, then an industrial AI company, and now a women's health company — it looks like someone who can't decide what to do.

If you read it backwards, it tells a different story. And the backwards version is the one I've come to trust.

The thread was never the industry

I trained as a production engineer in Brazil. Production engineering is the discipline of the whole: how the parts of a system — people, machines, money, time — fit together to produce something. I didn't know it at the time, but that training gave me a single habit I've never lost. When I meet a new field, I don't look at the parts first. I look for the connections between them.

That habit is why my career looks erratic on paper and feels inevitable from the inside. I've never actually changed what I do. I've only changed the system I'm applying it to.

What each chapter was actually teaching

Construction taught me that the interesting failures are almost never single-point. A project doesn't collapse because one thing went wrong; it collapses because a delay exposed a dependency that shifted a budget that changed a decision. The work is in the interfaces.

Process engineering in Germany taught me the same lesson with harder physics. In a conversion plant you cannot optimize one stage without starving another. The system sets the limit, and the limit is usually more honest than the ambition.

Technology scouting taught me to read early-stage ventures the way I'd read a plant — not for the pitch, but for the loops: what's being measured, what's being adjusted, where the feedback is missing.

The consumer venture, LIV-LIFE, taught me something the technical work never had to: that a system made of people behaves by different rules, and that a product that sounds good and a product a person will actually live with are two very different objects.

And GEMINO AI — building industrial AI for messy, real-world operations — taught me that intelligence is the easy part. The hard part is the last mile, where the model meets a reality that refuses to behave like a clean dataset.

Why backwards is the honest direction

When I started reading about ovarian aging and female healthspan, people asked why an engineer would pivot into women's health. But reading backwards, there was no pivot. There was one instinct — understand the system before you try to change it — finally meeting the system that mattered most to me personally.

The body is the system I'd been training for without knowing it. It's interconnected, under-served, studied in fragments and treated in fragments, and it punishes anyone who arrives with a solution before they've understood the whole. Everything I'd spent a career learning, it turns out, was practice for this.

I don't think careers need to look coherent on the way through. Most of the interesting ones don't. They look coherent on the way back — if you're honest about the thread, and lucky enough to find the system that was worth the whole winding approach.