Complex software problems. Practical solutions.
I help companies design, build, scale, and improve software platforms, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered applications.
From early-stage architecture to production troubleshooting, I bring 20+ years of hands-on engineering and technology leadership.
Based in Italy • Working across Europe and internationally • Available for new engagements
What I can help you build, improve, or fix
Build a software product
Turn an idea or specification into a reliable SaaS platform, web/mobile application, API, or backend service.
Scale or rescue an existing system
Resolve performance bottlenecks, improve reliability, modernise architecture, and control infrastructure costs.
Apply AI to real problems
Integrate computer vision, semantic search, document processing, and intelligent automation into practical workflows.
Get senior technical expertise
Architecture reviews, technical leadership, difficult engineering decisions, and hands-on help when your team needs it.
Solutions I can build, from technical capability to working systems
Real-time object detection and counting
Detect object classes (e.g. car, person, head, smartphone, etc.) from live camera feeds.
Detect parts of objects e.g. head/body, plate/car, trademark/product package, etc.
Count objects per each class, in real time.
Recognise specific brands/models, plants species, people, etc. against a visual dictionary.
Image: Stephane Charette
Real-time visual inspection
Detect visual defects, missing components, foreign objects, or unexpected visual anomalies using live camera feeds.
Potential applications: manufacturing quality assurance, packaging, industrial monitoring.
Image: Stephane Charette
Intelligent document and image processing
Index and search documents and images. Normalise entities. Classify content.
Search large document collections by meaning, not just exact keywords. Enhance keyword search with stemming, synonyms and fuzzy search.
Find similar images, and identify near-duplicates.
Potential applications: search engines, legal research, knowledge management, publishing, compliance.
Scalable, reliable application backends
Design and improve production systems that handle demanding workloads, complex databases, and mission-critical applications.
Design and implement ETL pipelines that can reliably ingest tens of thousands of events per second.
Fix slowness in existing applications, optimise database workloads, design resilient distributed architectures, and handle high-throughput event streams.
Implement intelligent alerting systems that detect variance anomalies in time series datasets.
Monitor latency at various percentile metrics (p95, p99, p999). Plot everything on beautiful Grafana dashboards.
Potential applications: growing SaaS products, analytics platforms, traffic arbitrage platforms, transaction-heavy systems.
SaaS platforms
Commercial-grade subscription-based web applications with accounts, permissions, payments, API integrations, background processing, and scalable infrastructure.
These can be enhanced with the following options:
Native mobile apps (Android / iOS).
Real-time in-browser messaging.
Detection of adult-oriented or otherwise inappropriate text, images and video content in chats and DMs.
Intermediation fees for marketplaces.
Integration with SMS services and third-party SSO providers such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, Okta, etc.
Bulk SMTP sending with automated processing of bounced messages.
Potential applications: B2B platforms, vertical SaaS, marketplaces, specialised commercial tools.
Real projects. Real engineering challenges.
Client Project • Technical strategy • DevOps
Ezyid.com
EZYiD is a fast-growing hardware and software startup based in Australia that offers solutions for tracking assets for their entire lifecycle.
I am involved in infrastructure management and planning (on Google Cloud Platform), DevOps, IT Operations and database design.
My contributions include:
- Migration to dotnet and SQL Server on Linux.
- Several improvements in application performance and resiliency.
- Offloading of searches and listings to a specialised document-oriented database (Apache Solr), which brought significant performance improvements for clients with over 10k assets.
- Instrumenting of a multi-stage CI/CD pipeline with SAST, secrets detection, and automated testing.
- Introduction of trunk-based development (main is always releasable) and of the "build once, promote, gated prod" paradigm.
- Latency monitoring (p75, p99, p999) for critical paths via a graphical dashboard.
In-house Project • Technical strategy • DevOps
Sercanto.com
Sercanto.com is a search engine for job ads that ingests tens of million of job ads every day. Sercanto is a traffic arbitrage company operating in 35 countries, which delivers several million page views and API calls per day, at peak rates of 8000/sec.
I was tasked to rebuild and lead the IT department in 2022. I built and co-managed a team of 13 people at peak.
My contributions include:
- A significant reduction (> 80%) in Sercanto's cloud spending through continuous optimisation and insourcing of some services like e.g. bulk email sending.
- Introduction of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) culture, practices and tools.
- Continuous tuning of the web platform, which includes realtime traffic filtering to prevent malicious bots from slowing down users' traffic or legitimate crawlers.
- Fine tuning of Apache Solr for better relevance in search results; introduction of a job titles taxonomy with synonyms in order to normalise searches and expressions in each job ad. A user searching for "Office coordinator" will find an ad containing the expression "Administrative specialist", which is semantically close to the user intent.
- Detection of duplicates and quasi-duplicates (ads where only a handful of words differ but the greater part of the text structure is the same).
Founder-led Product • Open Source
RelevantForms.com
Commercial SaaS with subscriptions, payments, NLP (Natural Language Processing) and scalable infrastructure.
The WordPress plugin is a high-end form manager with flexible field types, conditional logic, file uploads, multi-page forms with save-and-resume, submission preview, etc.
It supports the most popular page builders for WordPress: Gutenberg, Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks, WPBakery.
Import of existing forms from the popular WPForms plugin is also available.
AI-powered filtering of submissions happens on the Relevant Cloud. For each form, the site admin can describe its purpose, what should be considered urgent and what should be considered spam.
Relevant Forms will ask the Relevant Cloud AI engine to evaluate the content of each submission (minus personally identifiable data, which is always redacted) for meaning, relevance, intent and urgency.
Important messages will receive a high attention score and will optionally trigger an SMS to the site admin's phone.
My contribution: I built the entire product, from idea to delivery.
Founder-led Product
ThinkAlike.me
Commercial SaaS with subscriptions, payments, high-dimensional vector clustering, KNN search, and scalable infrastructure.
ThinkAlike.me is a matchmaking application based on psychological compatibility. It caters for people looking for a serious relationship. Users are presented with a comprehensive questionary (300+ items) for assessing their psychological traits, based on three well-established psychometric frameworks (Big 5, Jungian types, Connection styles). ThinkAlike features also an original set of questions, called Shared Reality, that focus on one'd fundamental values and how the person "reads" reality.
Questions are presented in an infinite scroll fashion, similar to X and other popular social media, and in random order. Once a suitable number of questions has been answered, users are presented with their own scores and the search for matching profiles starts in the background. A sprint algorithm detects when the user is close to completing one of the frameworks and makes the last few questions for that framework appear in the user's feed.
The application features an in-browser realtime chat based on the WebSockets protocol, with the ability to attach pictures. User-uploaded media files are queued in the background to be recompressed using Google's JpegLI library.
My contribution: as a technical co-founder, I helped bring the initial idea to an actionable plan and I designed and delivered the software, the infrastructure and the marketing website.
How I work
I work for my clients, not for technology vendors.
I have strong technical opinions, but no commercial allegiance to particular technologies.
While I'm happy to take on well-defined, short-term assignments, I particularly value long-term engagements. A deep understanding of a client's business and systems allows me not only to support their evolution, but also to identify opportunities where technology can improve existing products, enable new capabilities, or create entirely new possibilities.
In practical terms, each project follows four stages:
1. Understand the challenge
We discuss your objectives, constraints, existing systems, and what success looks like.
2. Plan the work
I recommend a technical strategy, scope and delivery plan.
3. Build and deliver
I work hands-on, independently or alongside your team.
4. Monitor, measure and iterate
Once the project is launched, I use gathered data to propose further improvements when necessary.
Have a challenging software problem?
Whether you're building something new, scaling an existing platform, or tackling a problem your team hasn't been able to solve, I'd be happy to discuss it.