Marco Cecconi
Verified Expert in Engineering
Solutions Architect and Software Developer
Trento, Province of Trento, Italy
Toptal member since May 17, 2019
Marco is a fractional CTO and systems architect with 20+ years of experience scaling teams and platforms. He was a core developer at Stack Overflow and the first engineering manager at Toptal. Currently CTO at a renewable energy firm, he blends strategic leadership with hands-on architecture and DevOps. He’s also a speaker, blogger at sklivvz.com, and long-time Stack Overflow contributor with a reputation of 30,000+. He specializes in scale-ups, cloud-native, and high-performance engineering.
Portfolio
Experience
- Enterprise Architecture - 20 years
- Agile Software Development - 20 years
- CI/CD Pipelines - 20 years
- Performance Optimization - 20 years
- Cross-functional Team Leadership - 17 years
- Distributed Systems - 15 years
- High-load - 12 years
- Cloud Native - 8 years
Preferred Environment
Startups, Distributed Systems, Cloud Native, High-load, CI/CD Pipelines, Leadership, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Enterprise Architecture, Performance Optimization
The most amazing...
...thing was scaling Stack Overflow’s architecture to serve over 1B pageviews/month with <5% server load, growing the platform to 13M+ questions and 100M+ users.
Work Experience
Chief Technology Officer
BaxEnergy
- Built a worldwide team of around 70 developers in about one year.
- Delivered the company's first SaaS product in 18 months.
- Became group CTO and started managing six products in five different companies.
Chief Technology Officer
Post Op
- Acted as chief technology officer for this scale-up, with responsibilities from budgeting and assisting sales to day-to-day coding.
- Assessed the technical team and ensured we could reach series A quickly and safely.
- Ensured that our software development lifecycle (SDLC) was efficient, safe, and practical, as well as source code and DevOps practices. Trained staff to ensure that they are skilled and set for success.
- Managed the engineering department's growth, hiring, and organization. Performed onboarding, off-boarding, training, etc.
Founder & Principal Consultant
Intelligent Hack
- Founded and served as the company's CEO, overseeing exponential growth of 12 times in one year while managing day-to-day operations to sustain the business.
- Acted as a consultant and top technical figure as part of my role.
- Empowered the executive team by providing training and guidance.
- Scaled the company from one to 12 people in one year. Acted as the person in charge of marketing and sales.
Chief Technology Officer
Terran One
- Co-designed and built a novel language for smart contracts, CWScript. This includes the compiler, tests, language design, and supporting tools like the LSP server for Visual Studio Code.
- Introduced project planning and structuring engineering as CTO. Managed the SDLC from requirements to SRE and from hiring to firing.
- Led and supervised the culture and growth, setting up a hiring pipeline, and successfully hiring high-quality engineers.
Lead Developer
Stardust Cards Corporation
- Served as a lead developer for Stardust, a software platform that offers an FT and NFT REST API to game developers.
- Accomplished the results by running all API transactions against PostgreSQL and then queueing them to be executed in various supported blockchains (Solana and ImmutableX, among others).
- Analyzed the legacy API written in TypeScript over Lua functions in Redis and rebuilt it from scratch in PostgreSQL and TypeScript. I designed, brokered, and developed this solution, contributing most of the code and tests over ten months.
- Created and developed the automatic queueing system that allows incoming transactions to be passed over to the blockchain consumers, using PostgreSQL and TypeScript decorators.
- Wrote the core SDK functionalities for Stardust's new Marketplace application being built to offer cross-game buying and selling of the FTs and NFTs provided by the games (a-la opensea.org).
Engineering Manager
Toptal
- Built an internet agent to encourage developers to speed up their tests. As a result, total test time decreased by 80% in nine months.
- Involved in transitioning internal development to Scrum and built agile dashboards for 30 internal teams.
- Built bug workflow—from reporting to SLA definition and monitoring—and Slack integration.
- Led the migration of Toptal from YouTrack to Jira in less than two months.
- Served as the first engineering manager, managing 20+ people in four teams.
Senior Software Developer – Core Team
Stack Overflow
- Served as part of Stack Overflow's "core" team of ten people building and running the site.
- Built the Stack Overflow help center (multi-language, multi-site).
- Built and product-managed Stack Overflow's new home page.
- Participated in Stack Overflow localization in four languages.
- Built a suspicious vote detection tool to catch "cheating" on the site (competing against about ten million smart developers).
Team Lead
Trayport
- Built Clearing Hub, a server allowing energy traders to automatically clear trades.
- Built EMAG, a tool to allow investment banks to lend capital to traders by limiting their exposure in real-time.
- Was one of two hiring managers in charge of selecting developers.
Solutions Architect
Sophos
- Ported the legacy website written in Perl to C#, a multi-year project for which I was the technological leader and senior architect. It was released in 2011.
- Reviewed and modernized the internal enterprise architecture in collaboration with other internal architects and stakeholders.
- Ported the Sophos award-winning blog "Naked Security" from an internal platform to hosted WordPress.
- Ported the legacy internal marketing system to a new platform.
Senior Architect
FullSIX Portugal
- Built dozens of major brand websites and marketing initiatives: Coca-Cola, UZO, McDonald's, and similar.
- Built an internet sticker album in a joint venture with Panini, UEFA, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft for Euro 2008.
- Helped the CTO build the production department from one developer to around twenty.
Technical Director
FullSIX France
- Acted as the architect and project manager building the first European Kitchen-Aid website.
- Was the technical person in charge of Airbus' website.
- Pitched, estimated, and built many multi-million dollar projects (as technical director).
- Was in charge of international projects, working in Paris, but led development teams in two other countries (Italy and Portugal).
Senior Architect
FullSIX Italy
- Built or helped build about a hundred major brand websites, including work for Ferrari, Kinder, Ferrero, Nutella, Disney, il Sole 24 Ore, and Pirelli as a developer, architect, and team lead.
- Held many tasks and responsibilities: from software design and development, game and multimedia development in Flash, to audio engineering for the localization of hundreds of hours of content in 15 languages.
- Helped build a code generation system to add two billion unique codes into Kinder eggs and track their usage, including validation using RSA.
- Built the first SMS reminder system in Italy, with a custom kernel Linux server plugged into 16 GPRS modems.
Experience
Stack Overflow
Toptal LLC
https://toptal.comTrayport EMAG
https://trayport.comEducation
Laurea (Incomplete) in Theoretical Physics
Università degli Studi di Milano - Milano, Italy
High School Diploma in International Bacchalaureate (scholar)
United World College of South East Asia - Singapore, Singapore
Skills
Libraries/APIs
ASPX, StackOverflow API, jQuery, Node.js, Google Cloud API, Protobuf, GitHub API, React Native for Web
Tools
Visual Studio, Dapper, Git, Microsoft Silverlight, Lotus Notes, Flash, RuboCop, Elastic, Docker Compose, Amazon Cognito, ANTLR, Terraform, MQTT
Languages
C#, JavaScript 5, SQL, C#.NET, CSS, JavaScript, F#, PHP, Java, C++, JavaScript 6, Perl, Ruby, C, Assembly, TypeScript, Sass, Rust, Python
Frameworks
Razor, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Core 2, .NET, .NET Core, Bootstrap, Express.js, Razor Pages, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), React Native, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Next.js
Paradigms
Web Architecture, Agile Software Development, Scrum, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Procedural Programming, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), REST, DevOps, Kanban, Concurrent Programming, Functional Programming, Event-driven Architecture, ETL, CQRS, Azure DevOps, Management
Platforms
Windows, Linux, Cloud Native, Azure, Oracle, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CosmWasm, Blockchain, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Apache Kafka
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2014, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2010, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2000, Azure Websites, Redis, JSON, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL, SQL Server DBA, SQL Server 2012, IBM Db2, Oracle SQL, MySQL, Google Cloud, Elasticsearch
Industry Expertise
Trading Systems, Marketing
Other
Architecture, Full-stack, Web Development, SOLID Principles, Scrum Master, Product Ownership, Technical Hiring, Algorithms, Scalability, Performance, SQL Server 2015, Cloudflare, Email Marketing Automation, Software Architecture, APIs, Leadership, Team Leadership, Startups, Distributed Systems, High-load, CI/CD Pipelines, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Enterprise Architecture, Performance Optimization, Statistics, SOAP, Data Structures, Commodity Trading & Risk Management (CTRM), Product Management, Email Marketing, B2C Marketing, Pub/Sub, Message Queues, CTO, IIS, Localization, Internationalization, Content Management Systems (CMS), Remote Team Leadership, Real-time Data, Energy, Automated Trading Software, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Large-scale Projects, Kitchenware, Tourism, Sales Pitches, Cost Estimation, Algorithmic Trading, Serverless, Amazon API Gateway, Azure Event Grid, Amadeus, Music Composition, Trading, FIX Protocol, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), Solana, ERC-20, ERC-721, WebAssembly (Wasm), Cryptocurrency, Smart Contracts, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Hiring, GoDaddy, Timescale, OPC UA, OPC Data Access, Modbus Protocol, Green Energy, Energy Management, Asset Management, CMMS, Operations Management Systems (OMS), Critical Systems
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