About Me

Hi, I’m Caio Velasco 👋. Mechanical Engineer from Brazil with a Master’s in Economics & Public Policy (UCLA), thanks to a full scholarship from the Lemann Foundation. In 2021, I stepped away from a PhD in Economics in the Netherlands to support my family during the pandemic and redirected my focus fully toward Data Science.

I work at the intersection of engineering, economics, and data—spanning Business Analysis, Consulting, Analytics Engineering, and Data Science across the US, UK, Spain, and Brazil. I enjoy turning messy, fragmented systems into robust end-to-end data platforms and pairing that with mathematical depth (statistics, econometrics, and causal ML) to drive real-world impact and avoid the correlation vs. causation dilemma.

What I’m doing now

  • Building an open book: Foundations of Data Science & Causal ML: A Mathematical Journey (mathematical rigor + applications).
  • Helping teams modernize their stacks (ingestion → modeling with dbt → warehouses like Snowflake/Redshift → governance & Looker dashboards).
  • Deepening foundations in real analysis, probability, statistics, and causal inference to support future research.

Selected highlights

  • Awards & scholarships from Yale University, UCLA, GE Foundation, Lemann Foundation, and The Club of Rome.
  • Early career: helped build Stone Payments (NASDAQ: STNE) in Brazil from scratch and founded MePrepara, an online math prep platform with 140+ videos supporting low-income Brazilian students.

Focus areas

  • Data & Analytics Engineering: Python · SQL · dbt · Snowflake/Redshift · AWS · Looker · best practices for modeling, tests, CI/CD.
  • Stat/ML & Causality: mathematical statistics, econometrics, causal inference.
  • Education: writing clear, didactic materials; mentoring; building bridges between theory and practice.

Values & approach

  • Rigor + practicality. Start from first principles, then ship value.
  • Clarity. Well-structured code and always documentating the process didacticaly.
  • Impact. Data and technology as tools to expand opportunity—because education changed my life.