My new book, Human Agency in a Digital World, is coming soon
Human Agency in a Digital World is a book about reclaiming our role — not as passengers, but as pilots — in the fast-moving journey of technological change. Written by a computer scientist who is also a father, a teacher, and a lifelong learner, this book is a personal and accessible guide to the systems shaping our lives — and how we might shape them back.
All author proceeds from the book are donated through Microsoft Philanthropies to expand access to computer science education.
My book, A Platform Mindset: Building a culture of collaboration, is now available
The book provides a practical and thoughtful perspective on technology management, drawing from my extensive twenty-year career at leading companies like IBM, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, and, more recently, at the Brazilian fintech Stone, where I strove to drive deep technological transformation.
All author proceeds will be donated to organizations supported by Microsoft Philanthropies. The book appeared first in Portuguese with the title Tecnologia Intencional, and the proceeds of the Brazilian edition will be donated to Fundação Estudar.
Bio snapshot
I’m currently in my second tenure as Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where I work as CTO 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. I continue to serve as an advisor to the company.
See my full resumePreviously, in my first tenure as Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft (2013-2022), I worked as the chief architect for Azure Compute and led the Azure efficiency team. In my previous roles at Microsoft, I worked on the production infrastructure for Bing and in several Bing Ads projects.
From 2011 to 2013 I was a Staff Research Scientist at Google focusing on search infrastructure. 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.
I started my career 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, and helped developing an Enterprise Search Engine that resulted in the IBM OmniFind Enterprise Search.
See my full resumeAcademic background and research contribution
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.
See my selected publicationsMy 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).
During my scientific journey I’ve obtained more than 50 patents (and many others filed) and published more than 50 papers. I’ve also been in several program commitees over the years, including SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, KDD, and CIKM, and I’m an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member.
See my selected publications
The A Platform Mindset website presents the core concepts of my book in an accessible and engaging way. It offers insights into the three themes — Culture, Technology, and Leadership—, providing guidance on managing a technology company with a mindset focused on scalability and collaboration.
For Brazilian readers, I’ve also developed a dedicated website featuring the Portuguese edition of the book, Tecnologia Intencional.
Visit the A Platform Mindset website to explore more.
Explore more
Human Agency in a Digital World
Human Agency in a Digital World is a guide to reclaiming our role—not as passengers, but as pilots—in the fast-moving journey of technological change.
In this deeply personal and accessible book, Marcus Fontoura explores the hidden architectures of modern life—social media, search engines, cloud platforms, AI, and quantum technologies—revealing how they shape our world and how we might shape them back.
Blending decades of experience with reflections on everyday life, he demystifies complex systems and asks a simple but profound question: what do we want technology to do for us—and what will we do with it in return?