About

I'm Romildo Wildgrube, but nobody calls me that — I go by Romi. RWILD is just the handle this site is named after.

I lead IT Engineering at Airtable. In practice that means identity and access, endpoint management, the collaboration platforms everyone lives in, and the unglamorous automation that keeps a fast-growing company from tripping over itself.

Before Airtable I spent six years at Coursera, where I grew the IT organization from two people to fifty as the company went from 285 to 1,600 employees. Before that I built IT from scratch at Barefoot Networks, ran systems operations at Personal Capital as it scaled past 1.3 million users, and — going back far enough — administered Solaris and IRIX boxes at NetGravity in the late nineties. Twenty-five years of this, give or take.

The through-line is that I like systems people can actually operate. Secure and scalable matter, but so does whether the person on call at 2am can understand what they're looking at. That bias shows up in everything I build.

I grew up speaking Portuguese, studied in Germany and Brazil, and work in four languages — which is probably part of why I care so much about whether a system makes sense to someone who didn't build it.

Right now I'm most interested in what happens when you give AI agents real work and real permissions — where the leverage is, and where the guardrails have to go. I write most of that down here.