Goodbye iFood

This past week was my last at iFood, after 2 years (actually 3, 2021-2022 and 2024-2026), I’m moving on to a next thing. Later I will probably write a longer post about iFood, but it’s an amazing open company which the culture really dictates how to operate in a fast, free and innovative way. The culture is called JiT (Jeito iFood de Trabalhar, which in English means “iFood’s Way of Working”). Here’s the note I left in Slack for my fellow engineers.

This week is my last at iFood. I want to thank all the close engineers, scientists and managers I worked with in different domains and trusting me on collaborating with you. I learned a lot with you, on technical knowledge, product design and life wisdom. Some moments here are truly my life’s highlights and I will never forget them.

I love this company so much that I’ve worked twice. Here, everything is possible: read iFood’s entire codebase and fix bugs, deploy software at scale, create infrastructure, test hypothesis and validate them in our incredible rich datalake, talk to anyone async thru Slack and sync by scheduling in Calendar… The tools we build just make this easier, but this is only possible because of our open culture. JiT is amazing and you should know by heart. I can’t count how many times it helped me make good decisions at iFood. “Sonhe Grande” (Dream Big) and make iFood as big as Google, “Ágil” (Agile) so we can move and learn faster as any startup, “Conflitos Produtivos” (Prodctive Conflicts) so we can discuss alternatives based on data safely to reach a decision together, and “Gente” (People), that makes iFood unique. Fight for keeping the open culture that makes iFood grow so much in the past 15 years. Help your team reminding JiT values and encourage accountability so you can trust each other.

Dive deep in every technical topic so you can help build iFood and drive it to the best technical advantage and efficiency. You can just learn things. Study and learn everyday and not limit your brain on learning hard things. Our brain is the most capable and efficient computer (yeah, the 20W estimate, while Kimi K3 with 8 GB300 requires 12 kW - 15 kW) in the world, designed by God Himself. With AI? Even easier. Just make sure you’re actually thinking and learning, not only copying and pasting what AI models give you. We already have Ctrl+C Ctrl+V for that. Just like AI models, we learn by making mistakes and reflect upon them to make better decisions in the future. Never skip the learning step, otherwise you will just keep hitting the wall (and maybe hurting others in the way).

I’ll miss you, mainly the friends I worked with such long hours solving hard problems. I’ll be praying for iFood as I always have been.

God bless you and see you in space,

Paulo Pacitti