A life across rules, kitchens, and languages.

Iliana Paulino grew up in Santo Domingo. Her education began long before any classroom: in her family’s kitchen, where the important things were learned by watching, and in the markets she visited on Saturdays, where the women who ran the stalls were her first teachers in negotiation, instinct, and respect for the quiet work behind a plate of food.

She studied law at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), one of the country’s oldest universities, graduating in 2010 with the equivalent of a Juris Doctor. Her first practice, at the construction firm Constructora Acosta Bello (CONABESA), gave her her first taste of working in the law: drafting contracts, advising on regulatory matters, interviewing clients, and learning that the most expensive sentence in any document is the one nobody reads carefully.

For most of her twenties, Iliana worked in corporate banking law. She joined Banco BHD de la República Dominicana as a Junior Legal Officer, where she reviewed corporate documents for banking clients and led the consolidation team for the legal revision department during the bank’s merger with another institution. The merger was a multi-stakeholder project spanning legal, compliance, and operations, and it taught her how to coordinate work across departments under pressure.

She then moved to Banco del Progreso de la República Dominicana, the institution that is today Scotiabank, where she rose to Senior Legal Officer. She handled loan formalizations, mortgage radiation letters, credit formalization procedures, and the corporate banking agreements that move actual money between actual companies. By the time she stepped out of the bank in 2017, she had spent five years learning to read contracts the way some people read novels.

In late 2017 she founded Canela Beading Studio under her own company, Grupo Paufer S.R.L. The studio was a small retail and direct-import operation. She sourced merchandise from China, built the brand from nothing, set up the supply chain, ran the finances, and recruited a small team. It was the first time she was responsible for a business of her own, and the lessons came quickly: customs declarations, margins, inventory cycles, the particular optimism that any first-time entrepreneur learns the hard way.

In 2021 she opened Lo Pecao Seafood Bistro through Pisek Solutions S.R.L. and served Santo Domingo for three years as its founder and general manager. She wrote the menu. She built the supplier network. She wrote the staff training program. She managed catering operations. She passed every health inspection with zero violations. She built a loyal clientele through consistent quality and service.

In 2024 Iliana left the Dominican Republic and landed in Vancouver. The Pacific Northwest is a long way from the Caribbean, and the contrast still surprises her: the way the light is different, the way people queue, the patience the rain demands.

Like many immigrants, she did not arrive with a job waiting for her. She took the work that was honest and available. She joined Union Latinos Restaurant as Kitchen and Production Manager, where she led the end-to-end redesign of the production system across two restaurant locations, consolidated food preparation into a single centralized commissary, documented the complete recipe library with standardized specifications, and ran the recipe costing that informed the menu’s pricing strategy. From there she took a season at Stanley Park Brewing Restaurant & Brewpub as a line cook, which she will tell you is one of the most honest jobs in any city.

She did not stop learning. In August 2024 she began a Master of Science in Management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an online program she continues today. In parallel, she enrolled in an MBA at University Canada West in Vancouver, with graduate coursework in Digital Transformation, Business Analytics, Machine Learning, and the Application of AI in Business. She graduates in April 2026.

In September 2025 she joined the Office of Research and Scholarship at University Canada West as a Research Assistant. She contributes to URSA, the Urban Resilience and Sustainability Alliance, a UCW-founded initiative working with partners across Canada and Europe. Her work involves the things she has always done well: literature reviews, qualitative and quantitative analysis using SPSS and NVivo, and weaving AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, NotebookLM) into research workflows so the work moves faster without losing rigor.

Somewhere in the middle of all the studying and the research and the kitchen shifts, Iliana started using AI in earnest. Not as a shortcut. Not as a quiet hack to do less work. As a new door. A way to read more, learn more, build more, and reach into corners of knowledge that used to require a team of specialists.

She does not believe AI is a magic trick. She believes it is a tool, and a profoundly democratic one. For the first time, a single-location restaurant or a two-employee shop can have the kind of analytical support that used to be reserved for businesses large enough to hire a consultant. The asymmetry that kept small operators perpetually behind is starting to break.

That is the work she wants to do next. She wants to teach small entrepreneurs, the ones who run shops and kitchens and trades and quiet little firms with a handful of people, how to build personalized systems that fit their actual operation. The tools are within reach now, the kind that companies like Anthropic have made affordable enough that a single-location business can finally afford its own kind of automation. Claude. Claude Code. ChatGPT. Gemini. Microsoft Copilot. NotebookLM. None of them require a million-dollar budget.

She holds a PMP from the Project Management Institute and the Google Project Management Certificate. She works in three languages: English, Spanish, and French. She reads widely, cooks constantly, and is most herself in the messy middle of a project that does not yet exist.

She is, in the end, the kind of operator who learns the rules deeply, then builds inside them. The kind of writer who pulls up a chair, asks the right question, and waits for what is not being said. The kind of teacher, increasingly, who believes the best tools should belong to the smallest hands. This is where she does all three.