Senior PM, Data Engineer, and — as of 2024 — PhD researcher in the messy intersection of LLMs and public data.

I'm Diego. I have spent most of the last decade shipping payment and data products at Braintree, PayPal, Venmo, Xoom, and Mastercard.

My work lives at the seam between product and data: I can pick up a dashboard, a PRD, or a pipeline depending on what the team is missing. I started as a developer, then moved into product around 2018. The engineering still pays the rent — good PMs can read the code and spare everyone the politics.

Today I consult on AI/ML product roadmaps and, in parallel, run research at Galileo University on Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Text-to-SQL for Open Government Data. My thesis is simple: public data is still mostly inaccessible to the public. Chat interfaces can close that gap if we build them with citation discipline.

Between 2019 and 2021 I taught programming to about 90 engineering students per semester at Rafael Landívar University's Faculty of Engineering. It remains the most useful thing I've done for my own writing.