Marcus Fontoura

A Platform Mindset: Building a Culture of Collaborartion

My book, A Platform Mindset: Building a Culture of Collaborartion is now available. All author proceeds will be donated to organizations supported by Microsoft Philanthropies.

The book was orginally published in Portuguese with the title Tecnologia Intencional. The proceeds from the Portuguese version are donated to Fundacao Estudar.

Summary

The book provides a practical and thoughtful perspective on technology management, drawing from the author's extensive twenty-year career at leading companies like IBM, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. More recently, he has played a crucial role in driving technological transformation at the Brazilian fintech, Stone.

Going beyond theory, the author shares personal experiences and lessons learned, offering a detailed vision of how technology should be conceived and implemented to accelerate business growth. He tackles key issues such as attracting and retaining top talent, the importance of standardized systems and engineering tools, and navigating inevitable technical challenges -- all while maintaining a deeply human touch. He advocates for a creative approach to technology that places it at the heart of organizational decision-making, particularly for companies undergoing expansion and scaling. By adopting principles from the world's leading tech companies, businesses can foster innovation and secure a competitive edge.

Grounded in real-life examples and personal stories, Marcus delivers valuable and inspiring insights for professionals at all levels -- whether leaders, students, general managers, or developers at the start of their careers.

Marcus Fontoura's Platform Mindset avoids the tiresome rhetoric of yesterday's leadership and management books to focus on what matters most in this digital age -- supportive, inclusive work environments where creativity and innovation flourishes to solve complex challenges for customers and the world.

Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft

Short bio

I'm currently in my second tenure as Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where I work as a lead architect for Azure Core.

Most recently, I was the CTO at Stone (2022-2025), where I led the engineering organization. I focused on building highly efficient financial platforms and an amazing engineering culture.

Previously I was a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft (2013-2022), where I worked as the chief architect for Azure compute and I lead the Azure efficiency team. I worked on several projects including container allocator, power management, and Resource Central, a machine learning infrastructure for resource management. In my previous roles at Microsoft, I worked on the production infrastructure for Bing and in several Bing Ads projects, including both ads infrastructure and relevance. My work on harvesting compute and storage for Bing has been described in this OSDI 2016 paper.

Prior to Microsoft, I was a Staff Research Scientist at Google (2011-2013) where I worked in the Search Infrastructure team. My focus was on the serving systems powering Google.com search. I've worked in many projects including performance and scalability of retrieval engines, novel compression schemes, indexing systems, and networking. I've also worked in retrieval techniques for large-scale machine learning systems.

Before joining Google, I was a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research (2005-2010) working on several projects in the area of computational advertising. I've also worked as the architect for a large-scale software platform for indexing and content serving, which is used in several of Yahoo!'s display and textual adverting systems. This platform implements state-of-the-art query evaluation algorithms and provides a generic framework in which retrieval systems can be highly customized for efficiency and performance. For this work, and for my contributions to display advertising infrastructure, in 2010 I've been elected Yahoo! Superstar and I've been awarded with two Yahoo! You Rock awards.

Prior to Yahoo!, I worked as a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center (2000-2005), where I co-developed a query processor for XPath queries over XML streams. This was one of key components of the implementation of the XML data type in the IBM DB2 Relational Database System. In another project at IBM, I was one of the key researchers developing an Enterprise Search Engine. This project resulted in a new software product for IBM - the IBM OmniFind Enterprise Search. My work on indexing was one of the key components of OmniFind. For this work I was awarded with an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, with the notation for development of a new generation of IBM search technology and its deployment on w3.ibm.com.

I've finished my Ph.D. studies in 1999, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (PUC-Rio), in a joint program with the Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo, Canada. My Ph.D. work was in the area of object-oriented design and software architecture. The main contributions from my Ph.D. thesis have been condensed in the book The UML Profile for Framework Architectures, published by Addison-Wesley in 2001. After finishing my Ph.D. I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University for one year (1999-2000).

I'm an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member. I've more than 50 issued patents (and many others filed) and more than 50 published papers. I've been in several program committees over the years, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, KDD, and CIKM. See my full resume for a complete list of publications, or my selected publications.

I'm very active on LinkedIn. Please follow me there for news and updates.

A scary picture of Cookie Monster and I hanging out in Jamaica.

Last revised: January 13th, 2024.