About
I make hard things feel learnable. Daunting things, like sticking with a new language every day. Dry things, like compliance and KYC. I'm drawn to products where getting it wrong means someone loses money, motivation, or momentum.
I started out as a designer and an educator at the same time, always pulled toward making hard things feel clear. That took me to Duolingo in its early days (a team of about 30, before the world knew what would hit 'em), where I spent nearly 8 years designing for 500M+ learners across a deeply global, multilingual product. Most of that work was community-focused. I co-created the Stories format, built Streak Society to reward the most committed learners, pitched and built the News Feed that connects learners to the brand and to each other, and co-created Duocon, Duolingo's first community event.
Then Remitly, for a very different challenge. I started on the Risk team, then became the seed designer for Remitly Business, taking it from a stealth web experiment to a core company bet now serving 25,000+ businesses. I learned what international KYC and KYB actually mean, and designed compliance flows that had to feel human. In a regulated product, trust is the whole product.
Across both, the through-line is the same. When something will need to repeat, I build the template: a reusable pattern, a review ritual, a way of working a whole team runs on. I lead design for my team, hold the quality bar, and move product direction without formal authority. I work AI-native, running several streams at once off my own tools, skills, and prototypes, and I'm helping other designers put Claude and GitHub to work.
How I make decisions: I move fast on two-way doors and slow down on one-way ones. In regulated products, I design the guardrails first, so the team can ship quickly without creating harm later. And every flow I touch should feel considered, especially the boring ones.
I'm trilingual (English, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish), have lived across the US, Brazil, and Sweden, and bring particular care to designing for people whose first language and infrastructure aren't the default.
Outside work: Scandinavian Society volunteer. In 2026, Carnegie Mellon brought me in to talk startups with their MBA students, then invited me back to judge their pitch competition.
Currently: designing at Remitly, learning to make things bounce, collecting retro games, and predicting Eurovision winners (badly).
Cheers