Roberto Pisati
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Dublin, Ireland
Toptal member since August 15, 2022
A geek by nature and a battle-tested software engineer by trade, Roberto spent more than two decades building exciting products for companies of all sizes, from small startups to big corporations. After so much time as a developer, he started to look for a different challenge and got into entrepreneurship. Roberto has been part of a very early-stage startup, helping with everything he could, from technical design to documentation and filling application forms for programs and accelerators.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET Core, Web API, REST, gRPC, Microsoft SQL Server, C#, Python 3, Visual Studio
The most amazing...
...project I've been working on is the Department of Social Protection's nightly payment batch. Millions of euros in support are being paid through it every week!
Work Experience
Owner
Level Up Ads
- Launched a new business in the only way possible—by making many mistakes and learning from them.
- Developed an extensive set of entrepreneurial skills, including creativity and lateral thinking, grit, commitment, ownership of results, accountability, desire to excel, and exceeding expectations.
- Accrued significant first-hand experience in business and service design, offer design, service fulfillment, team management, sales, customer management, and dealing with problems and difficult people.
Senior .NET Consultant
Department of Social Protection
- Redesigned and optimized part of the nightly payments batch, which processes every scheme and allowance we manage in the department while ensuring they are all paid to the public correctly and on time.
- Introduced a new scheduling system, Control-M, to automate the execution of the different components of the nightly batch, reducing the requirement for employees on a nightly shift from 8 PM to 2 AM (one on-site, one on call).
- Modernized the file transfer landscape across the department, migrating old data streams from ordinary FTP to a much more secure combination of SFTP and PGP encryption.
Founder and Interim CTO
Piccabi
- Designed and documented the architecture for a brand new SaaS solution based on a RESTful API back end supported by a machine learning cluster.
- Participated in early-stage brainstorming sessions and subsequent development meetings on product design, product-market fit, and commercial feasibility of a groundbreaking SaaS product.
- Engaged with stakeholders at different levels, from local business support offices to incubators and potential funding partners, to validate the idea and seek financial support.
Senior Software Developer
Bank of America
- Developed and maintained a large codebase of SQL and Python scripts and procedures, which were extracting and preparing market data and generating margin and risk reports for the management board.
- Detected and troubleshot bottlenecks, performance issues, deadlocks, and all the typical problems of a high-concurrency, data-intensive data transformation process. Implemented business process automation.
- Engaged with other teams and management at different levels to understand requirements and business needs and ensure that the reports we generated delivered valuable information.
Senior Software Developer
LeasePlan
- Designed, developed, and maintained massive applications, used around the clock from 30+ country-specific entities across the five continents.
- Engaged with IT staff from the local entities to help them integrate their specific tools into the global, company-wide, standardized applications landscape.
- Supported the credit and risk modeling teams in the process of translating their models into automated expert systems, which could automate and speed-up parts of the credit approvals for customers.
Senior Software Developer
MoneyMate
- Designed and developed data analysis solutions for the financial and fund management industries.
- Familiarized with large-scale, enterprise-level software components with all their specifics, such as widespread use of multi-threading, remoting for orchestrating services, caching for high performance, queuing, and service bus infrastructures.
- Worked in a hard-core scrum agile team, entirely using the Atlassian suite to manage the typical artifacts and ceremonies.
Software Developer
Freelance
- Collaborated with different customers on various projects—from internal applications for car garages to public-facing portals for pharmaceutical companies.
- Adapted and gave my best in different and sometimes opposite scenarios, from being a team player vs. a one-man band, depending on the size and type of project.
- Learned to upskill and pick new things up quickly to hit the ground running on new projects and opportunities.
Contract Software Developer
MeetingsBooker
- Developed a back-end system for a high-traffic booking portal.
- Optimized performance of the search engine and the UI response times.
- Managed the entire application cycle by myself in a small, early-stage startup.
Experience
ItoI - Inspection to Invoice
The Inspection-to-Invoice application replaced the cumbersome manual process of filling a paper checklist, scanning it, sending it to the invoice department who would print it, manually inputting values, and invoicing customers with a modern and sleek solution, getting the job done with just a few clicks.
As a lead developer on this project, I designed the application architecture, developed the back end, worked closely with the front-end developer who designed the UI, and engaged with many teams in different parts of the world to assist them in connecting and implementing the new processes locally.
Piccabi - Picturing a Healthier World
Piccabi is a groundbreaking AI model that recognizes food and provides an accurate estimate of the portion size. All with a simple picture, taken with a mobile phone.
As a founding member, I've been part of an exciting melting pot, helping out wherever possible and getting stuck in technical and non-technical tasks. During this time, I've learned to deal with stakeholders at different levels and quickly adapted to the challenge of presenting and defending ideas in front of people whose job is to "pull you apart."
The project is on standby as we never managed to get sufficient funding or support, but it has nevertheless been an incredible adventure and experience.
Workload Automation - Control-M
As part of a global modernization process, one of the projects I've been tasked with was to automate their legacy solution, based on an old .NET WinForms application where operators were still manually inputting parameters, values, and clicking buttons to kick off the job and review their status upon completion.
After extracting the core jobs functionality from the WinForms to a core set of libraries, I've been able to package them up into a command line tool (a console application) so that they could be executed via DOS commands or PowerShell. This put the Department in a position of going out for a tender for a generic scheduler tool and selecting Control-M (Java based) as their preferred choice.
Working closely with the operator's team, we automated the scheduling, execution, monitoring, incident creation, and reporting processes to the point that the requirement for people on a night shift went from eight persons to two, one actively working and one on-call.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics
Technological University Dublin - Dublin, Ireland
Certifications
Cloud Computing
Coursera
Computational Investing
Coursera
Machine Learning
Coursera
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Web API, REST APIs, jQuery, Windows Forms (WinForms), LINQ, Windows API
Tools
Visual Studio, Microsoft Excel, Git, Microsoft Word, Postman, Jira, Atlassian Suite, PyCharm
Languages
C#, SQL, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), C#.NET, Python 3, JavaScript, HTML, HTML5, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), C++, Solidity, Python, CSS, Batch
Frameworks
.NET, ASP.NET MVC, .NET Core, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core MVC, OAuth 2, gRPC, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), Angular, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Unity
Paradigms
REST, Scrum, Design Patterns, Requirements Analysis, Microservices, Scalable Application, Object-relational Mapping (ORM), Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Management, Automation
Platforms
Windows, Blockchain, Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows Server, Visual Studio 2016, Linux
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, Relational Databases, RDBMS, Data Integration, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), MySQL
Industry Expertise
Marketing
Other
Software Development, APIs, Software Design, Web App Development, Web & Mobile Applications, API Integration, Architecture, Integration, Legacy Code, Legacy Software, Web Development, Fintech, Web MVC, SaaS, Solution Architecture, API Design, Business Services, Open Source, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Mathematics, Reporting, Payment APIs, Technical Leadership, IT Strategy, WebSockets, 3D, Process Automation, Business Process Automation, System Administration, Full-stack, Scalable Architecture, Early-stage Startups, Mathematical Modeling, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), SOAP, Software, Web Services, Ajax, Performance, Caching, Search, Machine Learning, Software Architecture, Leadership, Documentation, Grant Proposals, Remote Team Leadership, Cross-functional Team Leadership, People Management, Business, Business to Business (B2B), Web Marketing, Advertising, Consulting, Ownership, Entrepreneurship, Supervised Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Classification Algorithms, Classification, Regression, Financial Markets, Financial Market Data, Computational Finance, Trading, Automated Trading Software, Cloud Computing, CTO, Scheduling, Job Schedulers, CI/CD Pipelines, Localization, Quality Control (QC), Conda, PIP
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