Dear All,
Please join me in welcoming Luis Bitencourt-Emilio to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Luis was unanimously appointed to a 3-year term and replaces a board-selected Trustee, Lisa Lewin, whose term ended in November 2021 [1].
Currently based in São Paulo, Luis is the Chief Technology Officer at Loft, a technology startup in the real-estate industry. He brings product and technology experience from a globally diverse career that has spanned large technology companies including Microsoft, online networking sites like Reddit, and a series of entrepreneurial technology ventures focused in the USA and Latin America. Luis has led product and technology teams across Latin America, the United States, Europe and Asia. He is passionately involved in building and promoting the entrepreneurial ecosystem for Latin American-based startups.
Luis has more than two decades of experience across product development, software engineering, and data science. At Microsoft, he led engineering teams shipping multiple Microsoft Office products. At Reddit, he led the Knowledge Group, an engineering team that owned critical functions such as data, machine learning, abuse detection and search. He was deeply involved in Reddit’s growth stage and worked closely with Reddit’s communities in that evolution. Luis also co-founded a fintech startup to help millennials manage and automate their finances.
His career has also been shaped by a visible commitment to recruiting diverse leaders. At Reddit, Luis was a key member of the recruitment efforts that achieved equal representation of women engineering directors. Luis says his proudest achievement at Microsoft was building their Brazilian talent pipeline by working closely with local universities to place thousands of engineering candidates at Microsoft, as well as his involvement in expanding global recruitment to markets including Ukraine, Poland, Great Britain, the EU and Mexico.
Luis was educated in Brazil and the United States, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with Honors from the University of Maryland. He is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and English. He is also a proud father and dog lover.
I would like to thank the Governance Committee, chaired by Dariusz Jemielniak, for this nomination process as well as volunteers in our Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities who also met with Luis or shared their experiences.
You can find an official announcement here [2].
[2] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/12/luis-bitencourt-emilio-joins-wikimedia-foundation-board-of-trustees/