Hey — I'm Mariana.
Platform engineering manager, builder, coach. Here's the longer story.
My path to tech has been much like me: slightly chaotic at first, strangely efficient quickly after. I started off as a med student, believe it or not. I was bored out of my mind in med school though, but it taught me something important I carried with me forever after: I'm a practical learner. I have a goal, and I figure out how to get there.
Did the first QA hire gig 4 times, and the pattern is always the same: arrive at zero, build the foundation, leave it thriving. Realized pretty quickly that's what I love: leading change. So after some reluctance giving up coding full time, I made the full shift towards management. Currently a true generalist leader, I am self-taught, driven and committed to empathetic and inclusive high-performance leadership. I'm demanding while leading with kindness, and I find I specialize in forming high-performance, high-complexity, autonomous teams.
Now, worth mentioning, I'm neurospicy myself (as many in our industry), which means I've spent years turning "how do I keep myself functional" into "how do I build teams that work the same way." Low-cognitive-load systems, documentation as infrastructure, async-first by default. It turns out what works for a neurodivergent brain works pretty well for distributed teams too.
I care about psychological safety, efficient accountability, scalable systems with high ownership, inclusive hiring, and the kind of environment where engineers do the best work of their careers. I've founded DEI initiatives at three companies. I value differing points of view, and I coach as much as I manage.
I'm based in Portugal, fully remote, and married to a basketball coach whose games I photograph badly and enthusiastically.