Senior infrastructure engineering and backend development for teams that need things to work under real load and real deadlines. Twenty years across datacenters, e-commerce, edtech, gaming and AI, delivered by Mega Labs founder Paolo Iannelli.
From the Linux kernel flag to the checkout button. Most engagements start with one urgent problem and grow into a long-term retainer.
GKE clusters with private nodes and Workload Identity, Cloud Run worker pools for bursty GPU jobs, AWS with CDK, and bare-metal fleets converged with Ansible. Environments you can rebuild from the repository.
One reusable deploy workflow instead of three copy-pasted templates. Trunk-based flow, database migration jobs that clean up after themselves, keyless OIDC auth to the cloud, Jenkins where it already lives.
Disaster recovery plans with real recovery targets, a runbook per failure mode, restores rehearsed with the whole team. And the hard-to-reproduce performance issue nobody else could pin down, found and fixed.
Fifteen-plus storefronts on Magento 1 and 2, WooCommerce and bespoke PHP, from ERP-connected B2B to parts retail with fitment search. Sixteen payment providers integrated, plus Italian e-invoicing and fiscal receipts.
Booking platforms on Laravel with Stripe instalments and refunds, Python and TypeScript services, and C when it has to be fast: custom nginx and PHP modules included. A SaaS we have run ourselves for twelve years, so we know what maintenance really costs.
Flutter and native apps with Firebase and RevenueCat, four Play Store products from one codebase, and GPU inference fleets serving photo-restoration models behind a single job queue.
WAF and adaptive DDoS protection, identity-aware access to internal tools, minimum TLS policies, bucket and secret hygiene, and sustained CVE and dependency triage across the fleet.
Site-to-site and remote-access VPNs, GeoIP-aware traffic steering, direct endpoints for regions where CDN traffic is filtered, and resilient tunnels between regions.
MariaDB Galera with rolling restarts, PostgreSQL with high availability and PgBouncer pooling, MongoDB replica sets across regions, Redis Sentinel with automated failover, Elasticsearch clusters.
Certificate estates across many domains and countries, DNS-validated automation with no downtime, private CAs for VPNs, and a certificate reseller platform we have operated since 2012.
Event ingestion at billions of rows a month, ETL into metrics warehouses, scheduled pipelines on Dagster, dashboards on Metabase, and the SQL views that keep them honest.
Custom Zigbee firmware for switches that misbehave, LoRa mesh feasibility down to the airtime formula, Home Assistant automations, and smartcard reader drivers going back to 2008.
A few engagements, the technologies involved, and the results that mattered.
SAP-integrated ordering, invoices and comments over SOAP and REST, customer clustering for campaigns, ticketed QA releases.
Payment modules for BNL POSitivity and MasterPass, FACT-Finder live search, GA/GTM with AdForm and Criteo, eBay integration.
MyParcel and SendCloud shipping, Postcode.nl lookups, Mollie and Afterpay, Zendesk order sync, in-house plugins for reservations and delivery times.
Event tracking for 180 million monthly users on the disco map/reduce framework, feeding a Vertica cluster. Fully automated, on modest hardware.
Automated server provisioning across datacenters worldwide, remote switch management, traffic measurement, and the first LeaseWeb CDN beta that became a top mirror for Mozilla.
Certificate reseller platform with CA API integration, CSR generation, expiry monitoring, EU VAT and Italian e-invoicing. Symfony first, rebuilt on Laravel and React.
Added a Google Pay gateway to the official MultiSafepay Magento 1 plugin, so merchants on the platform could accept wallet payments without a custom fork.
Fixed a missing banner method handler in the official CAS.AI Flutter ad-mediation plugin, the one used across our own apps.
Co-authored the public REST API design standards used across LeaseWeb's platform teams: resource naming, error envelopes, versioning.
First clients, first production systems.
Datacenter automation, CDN and cloud R&D.
Big data at scale, architecture board, Mega Labs and Mega SSL Store founded.
Edtech backend and Magento EE for Italy's food retailer.
Senior infrastructure engineer, ongoing.
AI photo apps and a self-run GPU fleet.
Google Cloud platform, CI/CD and disaster recovery.
Ansible-converged clusters across nine countries.
Pulled straight from eighteen LinkedIn recommendations written by managers, product leads, testers and fellow engineers.
Requirements are read for what is behind them. Solutions are sized to the organisation's goal, not to the technology on the table.
The rare quality as a programmer not to get bogged down in the code or technology, but to focus on the goals of an organization.Bart Dries, senior consultant
Flaws get pointed out before they ship, alternatives get proposed, and stakeholders get a partner in the design rather than a pair of hands.
One of the rare developers who actually think with you, point out potential flaws and suggest alternatives.Thorsten Einig, product and business development
A fix ships when the fire is out. The work continues until the solution is something worth keeping.
He still keeps on working on the project until he has a clean, fast-working solution.Ronny Roethof, senior platform engineer
Runbooks before incidents, dry runs before deploys, restore drills before the restore that counts.
A great programmer who plans his actions two steps ahead. When nobody can solve the problem... Paolo can!Jeroen Stolp, platform engineer
Three of the eighteen recommendations also mention the espresso. The office coffee machine gets tuned too.
Eighteen recommendations on LinkedIn from LeaseWeb, Spil Games and Squla, quoted as written.
Paolo worked as a freelancer at first at Squla. In this initial assignment, he built metrics aggregation and a dashboard within 2 weeks, including understanding the domain, context, and business need. I really like his speed of getting things done. Even as a freelancer, he always puts in a lot of thought into the assignment, thinking along with the stakeholders and coming up with good suggestions. He has great work ethics, and takes his responsibility seriously: I've never had to chase him about his tasks. He would extend himself beyond what is professionally sufficient, in order to complete difficult performance and load testing kind of tasks. I'd say his specialty is hard-to-reproduce performance issues, setting up complete websites from scratch, and skills in multiple programming languages. I'd certainly recommend Paolo as a good developer to anyone who has tight deadlines! He's a good guy to have in your corner.
Paolo is an IT specialist in development who has a very broad knowledge of software development and uses this knowledge to translate complex technical issues to solutions. And he does the work like it seems very easy. His hands really fly over his keyboard. He is very interested in the latest trends in software development. As a tester I was very happy to have him on the team, because he is very interested in ways to test the work from his development perspective. He has a quality approach on developing software and was the promotor in the team for test driven development. He understands that quality is for a big part a communication issue and agreed on doing product risk sessions with the team members. So here you have it: high intelligence, great sense of humor, passion in his trade and a great coffee specialist too.
Paolo is an IT professional with a preference for a structured but minimalistic approach. At Spil Games he worked on data processing for our analytics platform, and knows how to translate business requirements into technical solutions. His code is currently being used to process tens of billions of rows of data per month, in near real-time, on limited hardware. I would be happy to work with Paolo again.
Paolo is a great guy to work with. He knows his stuff and much more, a devoted guy to overcome challenges and issues that arise in automating advanced technical processes. As Hosting Operations team leader I invoked Paolo several times to overcome unforeseen issues at implementing new products. Because he understands all aspects of the wide and complex environments, combined with a good listener capability he was of great help within the organization during troubleshooting and solving the issues.
I had the privilege of working with Paolo Iannelli as Change & Release Manager at Ocom Leaseweb. Paolo is well educated, smart and broad-minded Senior Developer who can be trusted and is a reliable colleague. Result driven, precise and energetic Senior Programmer, with good sense of humor. It's an authentic pleasure working with him as he is an independent developer who distinguishes himself from the rest, with his creative solution-wise thinking. Give him a task and he gets the job done at full satisfaction!
I know Paolo as a friendly person and a very skilled programmer who has a heart for his tasks. On multiple occasions I worked with Paolo or requested his help with technical difficulties when it came to scripting. He is dedicated to his task and while he offers you a working solution, he still keeps on working on the project until he has a clean, fast-working solution where he can say "this is nice code and works fast". I was very happy with his help and scripts and would work with Paolo any day again.
I have worked with Paolo in various large projects and it has always been a great pleasure! Paolo immediately grasps requirements, as well as what's behind them. He is one of the rare developers who actually think with you, point out potential flaws and suggest alternatives. This in combination with his fast yet thorough programming skills truly make Paolo stand out!
For 6 months I've worked with Paolo on a new big project at Leaseweb. This project requires a broad set of skills. Paolo surprised me with his knowledge about a wide range of relating technologies. Paolo is a quick learner, has good architectural insights and sees the impact of technical decisions upfront.
I was impressed by his ability to adapt very fast to new technologies and his problem solving skills. Also a fast learner and one other important thing is the quality of his work. His ability to work efficiently under stressful deadlines tells a lot about his hard work and determination.
Paolo is in the possession of the rare quality as a programmer not to get bogged down in the code or technology, but to focus on the goals of an organization. Moreover, his personality allows him to think in terms of solutions and to participate pro-actively in projects.
I worked with Paolo on several high impact, time constrained, tricky projects where he demonstrated an ability to pull off stuff that sometimes seems impossible. Knows a lot about quality espresso as well.
Paolo is a great professional I have had the pleasure to work with. A result-oriented guy, he never wastes time for he always figures out what the goal is in a snap. I sure hope I will have a chance to work with him in the future.
I have worked with Paolo for 2 years and he never let me down. He is very smart and intelligent engineer, who can find himself in every task, whatever it is programming or system administration issues or hardware. He always sticks to the rules and has control over the situation.
Every time I had questions, about either Python, bash, C, RabbitMQ and a lot more, he was always able to help out. He's a specialist in software development, and knows how to solve problems. I recommend this guy, specially if you like to talk about coffee and food.
Paolo is a really open-minded person that shows great interest in technology. He is also highly skilled and an excellent coworker. His high dedication with all the above skills makes Paolo one of the best professionals I've worked with.
Paolo is a dedicated hard working colleague, always there to help out other employees. During my internship at LeaseWeb I learned many things from him, he's a great programmer who plans his actions two steps ahead. When nobody can solve the problem... Paolo can!
He always struck me as a sharp and keen on his job guy enjoying what he was working at. Paolo has proven many times to have in-depth technical knowledge in IT related subjects. I would highly recommend Paolo to any employer ready to challenge him at some exciting project.
Paolo is a great Software Developer with a high potential for our Company, he is focused and has the capability to make a success of all the projects he is working on. He can combine technical skills with a human factor.
All recommendations are public on Paolo's LinkedIn profile.
Chosen per project, not per fashion. Everything below has run in production under our care.
Tell us what is breaking, what is slow, or what you are about to build. You get a straight answer within a working day, and a plan before any invoice.