Mariana Silva

I'm a product manager based in London, born and raised in the north of Portugal. I studied mechanical engineering, found my way into data and machine learning, and later moved into product. That path still shapes how I build — grounded in first principles, energised by turning complex technology into products people love to use.

I spent nearly five years at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey as a forward-deployed engineer, building machine learning solutions to high-impact problems for Fortune 500 customers across life sciences and finance, with projects spanning the UK, UAE, Brazil, and the Netherlands. I was a founding engineer in the Life Sciences AI product team, became the first tech lead for Retail AI, and ultimately moved into a product track focused on AI developer tools.

In 2023 I joined a small team in Shoreditch with an ambitious goal: building a Physics AI platform using geometric deep learning to accelerate simulation. As the first R&D hire at PhysicsX, I lived the full arc of company building — writing the first ML methods and early wireframes, then growing into a Head of Product role. Over two and a half years I led a platform now deployed with enterprise customers across automotive, aerospace, and materials, and contributed to the company's $32M Series A and $135M Series B.

I left to build 0→1 once again — this time in the fast-moving world of coding agents — joining Tessl to work on an agent-enablement platform that helps developers generate and optimise context, evaluate agent behaviour, and understand how coding agents perform in practice.

Beyond the work, what drives me is curiosity. Living in six countries early in my career taught me to adapt quickly, listen carefully, and value the differences in how people think. I spend much of my free time reading, and recently I've been learning to draw — partly for fun, partly as a reminder that anything exceptional starts with learning to see.