[10] Barra attended primary and secondary schools at local Colégio Pitágoras in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and in 1995 enrolled at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), majoring in Electrical Engineering.

[14] While at Nuance from 2003 to 2007, Barra led a multi-year project alongside CTO Vlad Sejnoha to incorporate the company's flagship Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech-to-text dictation technology into Lobby7's cloud-based platform, which is rumored to have been the foundation to Apple Inc.'s Siri voice assistant.

[31] In September 2013, Barra left Google for Chinese electronics company Xiaomi, serving as Vice President of Global Operations based in Beijing, China.

[32] The move was considered a ‘significant hire’ for Xiaomi, one of the fastest growing manufacturers in China, enhancing international legitimacy to the company by adding a key former Google Android executive to its senior management.

[33] In December 2013, Barra spoke at LeWeb tech conference in Paris, France about his impressions of the Chinese economy and the opportunity it represented for tech companies such as Xiaomi, citing China's 600 million internet users, high market caps of recent Chinese IPOs, the massive scale of the top Chinese apps' monthly active users, and the size of companies such as Alibaba's Taobao, a shopping site more than double the size of eBay and Amazon combined.

Global expansion outside of China into surrounding emerging markets was a key initiative for Xiaomi, given the company's business model to release high performance smartphone products at an affordable consumer price, generating revenue not only from the hardware itself, but the software and internet services provided to the consumer.

[37] In March 2014, Barra visited Terry Gou at Foxconn in Shenzhen, a Taiwan-based global company with plants in Asia, Brazil and Mexico responsible for assembling products for various tech brands, indicating plans for Xiaomi to further expand into India, Indonesia and Latin America.

Industry analysts and reviewers considered this product Xiaomi's biggest hit in the Indian market due to its unique combination of performance, high-quality display, large-capacity battery and affordable price.

[45] There are reports that quoted Barra saying that his resignation was prompted by family or health reasons and some analysts noted that the departure came amid Xiaomi's declining sales in China.

In May 2021, Barra left Meta and immediately joined Detect, a health technology startup he was involved in co-founding.

[60] Since March 2020, Barra has been involved in various roles with Detect, a health technology startup he co-founded with scientist and entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg to develop consumer-grade molecular diagnostics products.