About

Name: Paulo Victor Leite Lima Gomes
Email: pg.gomes89@gmail.com
GitHub: pvgomes
Twitter: _pvgomes

I’m a software engineer with over 15 years in the industry. My first formal job, back in 2007, was teaching computers. I was already good with them, had just started university, and got hired to teach the basics to people in my city. That job paid for my education and, more importantly, made me fall in love with teaching, a thread that never really left me.

My first steps in code were the classical LAMP stack - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP - the kind of full-stack generalist that every web project needed in the late 2000s. In 2005 I started a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, but after three years of pure mathematics I made a deliberate choice: I wanted to build things. I switched to Computer Systems Analysis, and in my first year I already had an internship building health systems for a consulting company. In 2010, one year before finishing my degree, I moved to an education company building learning platforms for large corporations in Brazil and abroad. I graduated in 2011 and kept pushing forward.

In 2013 I started a postgraduate degree in Computer Software Engineering, because I’ve always believed that academic fundamentals make you a sharper decision-maker, even agreeing that a lot of time academics in tech industry are very far from reality, but on fundamentals side not.

That same year I joined Rocket Internet, a German 🇩🇪 startup accelerator as a software engineer. My job was to help launch new retail startups in Brazil, including Dafiti, the Brazilian equivalent of Zalando. The stack was varied and demanding: Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Symfony, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis and everything running on AWS.

With a few years of e-commerce depth under my belt, I received what would become one of my biggest career challenges: becoming CTO of Natue, a healthy e-commerce company looking to reach breakeven and sell to a major market player. The stack there was PHP, Python, Ruby, Angular, MongoDB, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ and AWS, including an early migration of 30% of services to serverless using Lambda and API Gateway. But the real challenge I had there wasn’t tech. It was connecting technical decisions to a business strategy that was changing every week, sometimes focused on people, sometimes on architecture, sometimes on how to unlock growth for the marketing team.

Shorting the explanation, in the middle of chaos, layoffs and lack of investiment. We managed to reach breakeven, basically trwoing out everything that didn’t matter and focus only on the goal. Because of this we did a M&A with Mundo Verde, the largest physical health retail chain in Brazil. I stayed on briefly as their CTO to align the integration strategy.

Four months later I changed industries entirely and joined Nubank as a Tech Manager of the credit platform team. Nubank was a Brazilian fintech, small at that point, and finance was completely new territory for me. But I knew how to connect business needs to technical execution, and that translated well. For the first six months I deliberately worked as an individual contributor to understand their stack from the inside, Clojure with Kafka and Datomic, and Spark with Scala on the data side. Very different from anything I had built before, and exactly the kind of challenge I needed.

Once I understood the foundations, my focus shifted to helping Nubank obtain its banking license in Brazil and then scale globally without duplicating the platform for every new country. Almost eight years that felt like twenty-five. We grew from around two million customers to over 120 million across more than three countries, and took the company public in New York.

During the pandemic I started giving back in a more direct way. I began teaching communities in São Paulo how to code, for free, for people who couldn’t afford formal education. Later, around 2023, I did the same in Poland for Ukrainian refugees and immigrants who had arrived without work. In 2024 I extended that further, teaching in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. That same year I released a course on Udemy, taking the same philosophy online.

Around 2023 I relocated from Brazil to Berlin to continue leading Nubank’s engineering globally, directly managing five engineering managers and five senior staff engineers, with 53 people across Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, the USA, Germany and the UK.

In 2026 I accepted an invitation to join Wio Bank in Abu Dhabi as a Senior Engineering Manager, owning the full lending lifecycle across credit cards, personal loans, auto loans and BNPL, scaling across six countries. The experience was rich, but the conflict in the Middle East made me reflect on what I actually wanted. For purely personal reasons, I decided to step back and take some time off.

I moved to Poland, where I now live, and in 2026 I decided to return to academia to complete a Master’s degree in Computer Science, with a PhD as the next step after that.

I also write. This blog is where I share what I find genuinely interesting in technology, with a particular focus on fintechs - architecture, distributed systems, engineering leadership, and the ideas I keep turning over in my head.