I am Ricardo Cataldi, a Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft and the Machine Learning Engineering coordinator and professor at FIAP. I am based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and I work at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning, cloud architecture, and production AI systems.

My academic path started in Economics, with a master's degree from UFRGS, and continued through Mathematics at USP. Somewhere along the way I became the kind of person who likes models, code, architecture, and uncomfortable questions. Especially the one that separates a nice demo from a system that survives Monday: does this still work after it leaves the slide deck?

In my courses, I teach AI, Python, agent architecture, design patterns, MCP/A2A, cloud, and machine learning with one simple obsession: good technology must be explainable, testable, and operable. Beautiful code that dies on the first deployment is not beautiful. It is expensive decoration.

I work with enterprise customers on AI solutions for banking, retail, education, and other industries, with experience across MLOps, evaluation, governance, agents, reusable pipelines, and reference architectures. I am also a published researcher with 106+ citations and the creator of technical samples such as Holiday Peak Hub, Tutor, and Tayra.

On Udemy, my goal is to turn complex subjects into practical learning paths: concept, example, trade-off, code, and decision criteria. No worship of the tool of the week. No magic promise. The point is to leave the course able to build better systems, review better designs, and distrust easy answers a little more productively.

The course content is authored independently and reflects my technical and educational experience. It does not imply official endorsement by Microsoft, FIAP, Udemy, or any customer.