Maid in USA: the creator of an Internet legend tells tales of barriers and success.

Soraya Bittencourt helped launch Brazil's first telecommunications satellite, but then she hit a glass ceiling, hard. Frustrated, she migrated to the United States in 1983 to advance her Career. It wouldn't be easy there, either. She started out as a cleaning lady but eventually came up with an idea that made her rich and revolutionized the travel industry--Microsoft's Expedia.com, a leading online travel service.

Bittencourt, 44, is now a senior technical director for Time Warner's AOL unit. She is also preparing to launch an online health-service business with investors in Brazil, which she declined to discuss.

Vibrant and otherwise plain spoken, Bittencourt exemplifies the many Latin Americans whose careers stall in their own countries due to politics, economics or cronyism. They come to the United States to reach their considerable potential, often starting from the bottom.

Bittencourt did come to the United States speaking English, but she faced two major transitions. The first was adjusting to the insular nature of U.S. citizens. "I felt very detached in the beginning. Brazil is very friendly. In the U.S., nobody wants to talk you," she says. The second was adapting to the subtleties of corporate life in the United States after enduring what she calls "old-fashioned, unabashed Brazilian machismo," in her book, My Road to Microsoft.

That road started in Rio de Janeiro. Bittencourt was a child math-and-science whiz who took to dismantling household appliances and reassembling them. After graduating from Universidade Gama Filho, she worked as an engineer for Brazilian tobacco company Souza Cruz. Weary of fighting off sexual advances, she left the company in 1982 to team up with an entrepreneur who produced touring musical laser-light shows. The Brazilian media dubbed her "laser girl."

After the tour ended, Brazilian telecommunications company Embratel hired Bittencourt as an engineer. The company assigned her to a team to launch Latin America's first telecommunications satellite in partnership with Hughes Aircraft of the United States and Canadian satellite company Telesat Canada.

She impressed her North American supervisors. They asked Brazilian authorities to give her the crucial and high-profile task of pressing the button to fire the satellite's apogee motor, which sets orbiting speed. Some Brazilian male engineers complained that the assignment was too important for a woman, Bittencourt recalls. "I pressed that button only because the Americans fought for me," she says.

At 25, Bittencourt felt her career had peaked in Brazil. She got a student visa to the United States and arrived in Boston in 1986 with her partner Lucila, who was attending the Berklee School of Music. To earn money, Bittencourt cleaned shopping malls. Finally, she secured desktop-publishing assignments through a temp agency. From there, she went on to head a software development team at Lotus, now a unit of IBM, and launch a storefront desktop-publishing business.

In 1992, while perusing products at a Silicon Valley trade show, Bittencourt had a vision: A multimedia CD-ROM travelogue on Brazil, and from then on, she worked on the idea nonstop.

On a visit to Brazil to gather content for the CD, Bittencourt noticed that life in the United States changed how she viewed her family. "Their lives seemed stagnant to me," she wrote. "My life in Boston was constantly moving in an upward spiral. In Rio, I felt like I had stumbled into an earlier, slower Century."

Bittencourt finished the CD-ROM Brazil: An Exotic Journey in 1993. The product allowed users to book reservations through easySabre.com, the predecessor of travel Web site Travelocity. But she couldn't line up a distributor. Later that year, Bittencourt accepted a job offer at Microsoft as a software developer, primarily to get the company's then-CEO Bill Gates to back her project.

Bagging Bill. Bittencourt tried to pitch her idea to Gates at a banquet for new employees, but another ambitious programmer cut her off. Determined, one Saturday she sneaked past security guards into Gates' office and dropped the travel CD-ROM onto his chair.

Several months later, a Microsoft executive told Bittencourt that the company would form a team to develop the project with her as the group's program manager. She negotiated a contract with Gates over the product, but when Expedia debuted in 1996 Microsoft nevertheless excluded Bittencourt from the company's senior management, she says. She was crushed, and left Microsoft in 1998. Bittencourt held a series of executive slots with software companies before landing at Time Warner in 2001. "This is my dream job," she says. "But who knows how long I will stay."