I started in 1994 writing software for process control. For about twelve years I worked where software meets something physical, namely plants, aircraft, satellites and television sets, and for the last fifteen I have worked on email, first sending it and then defending it.
Free flight, as a volunteer (since 2007)
Alongside my job, since 2007 I have sat on the board of FIVL, the Italian free flight federation, responsible for safety: collecting and analysing accidents, investigating the serious ones, having equipment tested, talking it through with pilots. For some years I turned that into an annual report for ANSV, the Italian air safety investigation agency, which included it in its report to Parliament, and today the accidents reported in Italy are open to anyone in the accident record on the federation’s website.
From there the work widened to Europe and to standards. As an expert at CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, I help draft the EN standards for paragliding equipment, and in Italy I sit on the UNI committee for sports and recreational facilities and equipment. At EHPU, the European union of hang gliding and paragliding federations, I worked on the European accident database from its early years, chaired the safety and training committee from 2016 to 2019, and have been on the management committee since 2021.
Since 2023 I have been on the board of Europe Air Sports, which represents some 700,000 sport and recreational pilots before the European institutions. There the subject became airspace, and with airspace, drones: at EASA I sit on the Drones Community Steering Group of the Stakeholders Advisory Body, and for the European Commission on the Expert Group on Drones and Innovative Air Mobility of the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE).
Cybersecurity (since 2016)
I joined Libraesva as CTO in 2016 and for ten years led research and development of its email protection products. In those years we built email classification models trained in house and deployed on the gateways, and an engine that learns from communication history who trusts whom and uses that map to judge a message. Then the engines that spot someone posing as an executive to get a wire transfer paid, the reputation services, and two sandboxes: one on the gateway, which defuses active code in attachments, and one in the cloud, which follows links in real time through obfuscation and evasion techniques. Over the same period the company achieved ISO 27001, 27017 and 9001 certification.
Since April 2026 I have been Head of Engineering and Group CISO at LibraCyber, formed by the merger of Libraesva and Cyber Guru.
Web services and email at scale (2011–2016)
At two companies I ran the design, development and operation of web and SaaS services. At the first I led a team of up to nine people across Italy and Ireland, on a distributed infrastructure built on circular MySQL replication, message queues, BGP and geographic DNS. At the second I designed a high-volume email delivery infrastructure that enforced quality at every step, starting from automatic audience selection, and handled the relationships with mailbox providers and sender reputation. That is where I learned how email looks to whoever has to decide whether to let it through.
Connected TV (2006–2011)
At TVBLOB, in Milan, I was the project manager for BLOBbox, a connected TV platform that ran on several chipsets and combined multiple tuners, a video recorder, an HTML5 browser and cloud services. I coordinated up to thirty engineers in about ten teams, from the operating system to the user interface. I set up quality assurance and beta testing from scratch, introduced agile methods, planned a public release every three months and ran the HDMI, HDCP and Dolby certifications at the manufacturers’ sites in China.
It was the most formative experience of my career, because the real difficulty was making a very complex product feel simple to someone holding a remote control.
Avionics and satellite navigation (2000–2005)
With Leat, part of the Vitrociset group, I developed experimental onboard systems, nearly all of them flight tested. The onboard unit for GBAS, the differential GPS correction broadcast from the ground for precision approaches, was tested at Milan Linate on ENAV’s flight inspection aircraft. For the Mediterranean Free Flight project, which studied how to hand part of the separation from other traffic over to pilots, I worked on the design of a cockpit traffic display with collision avoidance functions. Then a device to record electromagnetic interference in flight, the software to validate Galileo’s quality of service, and a test bed for ground proximity warning systems.
Satellite communications (2000–2006)
In the same years I headed software development at Star Systems Italia, later Radiomarelli, and worked for Radio Marine: set-top boxes and routers for the large yachts of the Ferretti group, a briefcase for encrypted field communications over Inmarsat, Thuraya and Iridium, videoconferencing and streaming over narrow, shared satellite links. Before that, for a company based in Monaco, I had developed the software of a VoIP phone shown at SMAU 2000.
Much of the work happened in the Linux kernel: minimal distributions built from scratch, encrypted partitions, hardware tamper protection, automatic remote updates, two satellite modems bonded into a single connection.
Clinical research (1997–1999)
For the American CRO Ingenium and its Italian subsidiary I worked as an IT consultant to the clinical research departments of Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Lundbeck, SmithKline Beecham, Allergan and IBM. I handled migration and validation of clinical databases, quality control across more than a hundred studies, and a data capture system based on fax and OCR, working between Rome, Copenhagen, London, Mississippi, North Carolina and California.
Process control (1994–2001)
I started at IOTA, in Rome, writing real-time control software in C for Telecom Italia, ENEA, SNAM and the Italian railways, including supervision of the interlocking systems that drive points and signals in stations. Later, for STAER, I wrote the firmware of the remote units that monitor SNAM’s gas pressure reduction stations.
Diploma in computer science from ITIS Fermi in Rome in 1989, licensed radio amateur since 1992.