~*~ 2015 to now ~*~
WORK
I have built software for ten years, in Padova, London and Dubai.
~*~ part one: 2015 to 2017 ~*~
MAINFRAME
I started in Padova, on a bank's mainframe.
PADOVA, 2015 TO 2017
Banca Intesa
My first job. I wrote COBOL on z/OS for the bank's digital identity work. The work went like this: write the program, wrap it in JCL, submit the job, and read the return codes when it came back.
Payoff
My first full stack job: a CRM used for EXPO 2015 and FieraMilano, IoT work for CAME, and a VoIP system built from Raspberry Pi boards and Asterisk.
A batch job on a mainframe. Ten lines of JCL and COBOL are entered under a column ruler, the job is submitted, and three steps report back one at a time: compile, link and run, each with return code 0000. The program prints one line and the job ends with maximum condition code 0000. The job is an illustration and is not code from the bank.
~*~ part two: 2017 to 2021 ~*~
LONDON FINTECH
In 2017 I moved to London and worked as an engineer on other companies' products, most of them about money.
LONDON ENGINEERING, 2017 TO 2019
Manheim
The analytics platform of the UK's biggest car-auction business.
Fortress GB
Fan portals for MLB, NFL and Premier League teams. I brought page load down from 8 seconds to 1, and built a payment gateway that worked across more than 18 providers and Apple Wallet.
NEWDAY
NewDay is the largest sub-prime credit-card provider in the UK. I led its innovation team. With Microsoft we built the call centre's first conversational speech chatbot, on LUIS.
We also built an OCR tool for CCI requests. Before it, 80 operators handled them and a request took two weeks. After it, 5 operators did, in one or two days.
NVAYO, 2020 TO 2021
Nvayo
Between Brightcast and Playter. Nvayo runs multi-currency financial services for premium clients, under the Aurae Lifestyle and ClubSwan programmes. I led the omni-channel support tooling: Twilio, VoIP and the WhatsApp API, on Node, TypeScript, React and AWS.
~*~ part three: 2020 to 2023 ~*~
FOUNDER YEARS
I co-founded three companies as CTO. The third was Playter.
BEFORE PLAYTER, 2020
FIO
My first company. FIO gave gig workers cash-flow management and upfront liquidity, built on Adyen and TrueLayer.
Brightcast
My second. Brightcast sent WhatsApp messages at scale for brands: awareness campaigns and customer journeys, built on .NET, Angular, Azure and Twilio.
PLAYTER
Playter is buy now, pay later for businesses. A company splits any cost over 3 to 12 months, interest-free.
| Role | Technical Lead on contract from Sep 2021. Co-founder and CTO from Jan 2022 to Mar 2023 |
|---|---|
| Raised | $55m+, by the company |
| Loans | $100m+ transacted on the platform |
| Team | 2 to 20, moved from offshore to in-house |
| Products | Three, designed and scaled end to end |
| Stack | Azure, .NET, Angular, SQL Server, domain-driven design |
| Worked with | Open Banking and Open Accounting, GoCardless, TrueLayer, Plaid |
I owned the technology, product and engineering strategy. The platform read a customer's bank and accounting data through Open Banking and Open Accounting, worked with GoCardless, TrueLayer and Plaid, and ran each application through risk-engine flows.
The team grew from 2 people to 20. I ran the hiring and moved engineering from an offshore team to an in-house one. I also wrote the GDPR, PCI, security and compliance policies.
As bookkeeping, the product is one invoice paid, then collected back in equal instalments until nothing is owed.
A double-entry ledger for one invoice. The invoice is paid to the supplier in full, which the buyer now owes. Six equal monthly instalments are then collected, each one a debit with its matching credit, moving from pending to settled. At the end total debits equal total credits, the buyer owes nothing and the interest is zero. The amounts are generated in your browser and are not real data.
~*~ part four: 2019 to 2025 ~*~
CRYPTO AND WEB3
Since September 2019 I have also worked as a founder and adviser for early crypto startups and web2 businesses, on payments, NFTs and DeFi architecture. After Playter it became most of my work, and for part of it I was based in Dubai.
SMART CONTRACTS AND ADVISORY
I write smart contracts in Solidity and Rust, mostly ERC-721 and ERC-20, with Hardhat, Truffle, Metaplex, Alchemy, Infura, IPFS and Copper.
Between 2020 and 2024 that covered the contracts for an ICO and an NFT launch for a luxury jewellery brand, an NFT real-estate launch on Solana, the rewards manager of a yield aggregator, and a DeFi aggregator on Ethereum mainnet that I co-led. An aggregator splits one swap across several pools, then waits for the block to be final.
CTO AND LEAD ROLES, 2023 TO 2025
Union54 (YC S21)
I designed a peer-to-peer payments and chat product for the African market: microservices, ejabberd, AWS, Node and TypeScript, React Native, PostgreSQL and Kubernetes. The MVP shipped in three months, while I also ran the existing digital-banking product.
Kaskade Finance
Quiet Loud
An events business, with AI in the product: matching briefs to suppliers, drafting quotes and briefs, and a voice assistant. I built the engineering team from zero and shipped the first version of an events-supplier platform in under three months, on Nest.js, Next.js, AWS, Terraform, PostgreSQL and Stripe. I also led product and design while the business moved from selling services to running a platform.
~*~ part five: 2025 to now ~*~
AI AND GOVERNANCE
Since the middle of 2025 my work has been AI.
BEFORE PROMENAUT, 2025 TO 2026
AILA
Cognitive Credit
PROMENAUT
The line on my LinkedIn is "Building Agentic Workforce": agents that do real work inside a company.
The part I spend most thought on is governance. An agent that acts for a company has to work under written rules, stop and ask a person when a rule says so, and leave an audit trail of what it did.
It is the same habit as the ledger at Playter: nothing happens without a record.
I run the same idea at home, as a graph of coding agents: one plans the work, others do it, one watches them and one merges what passes. Most of the projects were built that way.
~*~
EVERY ROLE, IN ORDER
| WHEN | WHERE | WHAT |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 2026 to now | Promenaut AI, London | Senior Platform Engineer |
| Oct 2025 to Aug 2026 | Cognitive Credit, London | Software Engineer |
| Jun 2025 to Oct 2025 | AILA | Founding Engineer |
| Sep 2024 to Aug 2025 | Quiet Loud, Dubai | Head of Engineering |
| Feb 2024 to Sep 2024 | Kaskade Finance, Dubai | Solutions and Architecture Lead |
| Jul 2023 to Nov 2023 | Union54 (YC S21), remote | CTO |
| Sep 2021 to Mar 2023 | Playter, London | Technical Lead on contract, then Co-founder and CTO from Jan 2022 |
| Dec 2020 to Oct 2021 | Nvayo, London | Technical Lead |
| Mar 2020 to Dec 2020 | Brightcast, London | Co-founder and CTO |
| 2020 | FIO, London | Co-founder and CTO |
| Sep 2019 to now | Various companies | Founder and Advisor: crypto, web3, payments |
| 2019 to 2020 | NewDay, London | Senior Software Engineer |
| 2018 to 2019 | Fortress GB, London | Full Stack Engineer |
| 2017 to 2018 | Manheim, London | Junior Full Stack Engineer |
| 2016 to 2017 | Payoff, Padova | Junior Full Stack Engineer |
| 2015 to 2016 | Banca Intesa, Padova | Junior Mainframe Developer |
EDUCATION
| Università degli Studi di Padova | BSc Computer Science |
|---|---|
| ITIS F. Severi | Computer Science, 2008 to 2014 |