CV 2025

I'm a principle-driven, people first manager, not afraid of change and ambiguity and with a strong belief that outcomes are byproducts of the investment in people and culture. I see my role as to set the right strategic guardrails to enable aligned autonomy, and give my direct reports the right operational support to set them up for success, but I'm very comfortable to get my hands dirty if needed.

Current Position

Since April 2020

Engineering Director

Storio Group (formerly Photobox Group)

private held

I was initially hired to support the team building a brand new serverless platform for an ambitious CRM strategy, then promoted to the leadership role for the eCommerce area, within the first couple of years.

Following the merger of Photobox Group and Netherlands-based Albelli, I focused on uniting 6 eCommerce teams — around 55 engineers across London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Lviv — into a single domain while driving commercial goals and system replatforming. The teams employed a wide range of ways of working, stacks and technologies — ranging from .Net to Node.js, from AWS to a custom K8s platform, from a 20 years old Perl monolith to modern event-driven microservices.

Beyond operational needs, I collaborated with the senior leadership to develop the domains’ technical strategy and budget. I also led the discovery process for the post-replatforming target operating model, proposing a major team reorganization aligned with a team topology approach and the company’s strategic direction.

Achievements

Personally drafted the plan, and contributed hands on, to deliverying a replatforming of 2 systems (CRM and Payments);
Enabled my teams to succeed in 2 complete system replatforming, transitioning half of our customer base on the designated group platform whilst maintaining commercial and operational KPIs;
Successfully mentored Senior Engineers transitioning to an Engineering Manager roles;
Dealt with with significant organisational ambiguity, complexity and change: merger, re-orgs, attrition & redundancies; budget challenges; distributed teams partially operating in active war zones.

I was the (co)founder of the no-profit organisation behind of one of the main European Front End Conferences: From the Front. I took care of communication and customer care since day one, and worked each year on the lineup, call for papers and inclusivity policies.

I spoke at several conferences, including Paris Web in 2011, Front Trends in Warsaw in 2015 and 2017, DIBI London in 2016, React Advanced London in 2021. I gave keynotes to the Italian CssDay 2019 and to React Alicante, where I spoke in 2018 and 2019, and JsDay, Verona (IT), in 2024.

Previous Roles

2018 - 2020

Tech Lead

Condé Nast

private held

Initially led the team replacing legacy CMSs to deliver a new experience for Vogue Runway’s editorial teams and customers worldwide.

After a merger with our U.S. sibling company, the focus shifted to cross-brand and syndication tooling while maintaining ownership of Fashion Shows services. Meanwhile, my role evolved from software and infrastructure architecture to line management, emphasizing team culture, dynamics, and morale.

Achievements:

Strong focus on team dynamics, collaboration and engagement, which helped successfully to navigate the merger of the companies and retain key talent in the process;
Architected a solution to sensibly reduce the time to market for the syndication tools, reduced risk of failures and delivered the project in the expected timeframe;
Setup lines of communication across teams to deliver projects with consistant coding quality standards and enable knowledge share;
Contributed to setting up a support rota and improve runbooks and observability, coordinated game days and coordinating documentation standards distribution.

2017 - 2018

Frontend Lead

Crowdcube

private held

First hire by the new CTO to drive a technical and cultural transformation, shifting the tech department from a “being told what to do” mindset to a problem-solving approach. I provided training, coaching, and production-ready proofs of concept to validate the transition to a modern stack, whilst leading a product team ad interim, and defined the hiring criteria and process for the role.

2016 - 2017

Senior Javascript Engineer

Kahoot!

private held

The brief stint — due to organizational changes leading to the London office’s closure, in this mission-driven, UX and data-led company, shaped my engineering mindset. I contributed to key projects, championed performance improvements, mentored junior colleagues, and picked up React, Angular, and Backbone.js along the way. #startuplife

2012 - 2016

Senior Web Engineer

Shazam Entertainment

private held

I was part of the web team building and maintaining the website, with a focus on a mobile-first companion experience to the app, emphasizing semantic markup, modularity, and responsiveness. I led the modernisation of the front-end architecture.

2011 - 2012

Front End Developer

Spreaker

private held

The company was a fast-paced startup with high coding and testing standards. As the first external hire, I worked remotely with the 2 technical founders until the funding offered the opportunity to, taking full ownership of the front end.

2006 - 2011

Clientside Architect

Yoox Group (now YNAP)

public company

I joined as the second front-end developer and left as a client-side architect delivering internal SDKs to the exeperience teams, after having lead 2 teams, witnessing the company’s market flotation, and contributing to the engineering team’s growth from 20 to 130.

2004 - 2006

Webmaster

MagicNet

private held

Started as an intership, I ended up handling full-stack development for all the agency projects as well as building internal tools to streamline SEO, content and time management, and a basic e-commerce platform.

2002 - 2006

Event Organizer

Kappa Management

private held

I managed artist bookings, accomodations and make sure the events ranging from a few hundreds to several thousands attendees ran smoothly. I was also responsible for marketing material and website.

Education

I was 3 years into a 5 years Communication Studies degree when I had the chance to turn my longtime webmaster hobby into a job. Stepping into the professional world, I realized my true passion laid in tech. A year later, I left university to pursue a full-time career in the industry.

More About Me

Strength

I take pride in presenting myself at face value, and to be as transparent as my role allows me to be. This is essential for building trust and being a reliable partner for my manager, peers and (in)direct reports.
I have a very practical mind when it comes to risk management and problem solving: this come very handy during crisis, but it’s quite helpful in complex problem solving, when having contingency plans is crucial.
Ambiguity doesn’t throw me off: I’m able to navigate uncertainty and keep my teams focused on outcomes.

Weaknesses

When presented with new information or plans, I tend to ask a lot of questions, sometimes seemingly unrelated. Those who know me appreciate this is my process and how I operate, but I prefer to give a heads-up early on to ensure it’s not misinterpreted as a lack of trust or focus.
I’m not a big fan of surprises — especially when it comes to discovering critical information in public settings. While I’m actively working on this, I still encourage my peers to keep me informed. I don’t mind being put on the spot, but having context in advance helps me contribute more effectively.
I do use a lot of emojis on slack 😅

Hobbies

I love going to music gigs (folk punk and DYI scene, mostly) — and I recently realised that I’m actually collecting band t-shirts with the “excuse” of supporting the scene — tension filled horror movies and casual board games (Sushi Go Party one of my favourites); I run to de-stress; and I code on my pet project, for instance:

You might not need https://youmightnotneed.com
Movie Colour Palette https://movies.dsgn.it
Flags of the World https://flags.dsgn.it/

Recommendations

He is highly respected for his integrity, direct communication style, and commitment to placing people and the organisation at the forefront of his efforts.

— Josh Marcus, VP of Engineering @ Storio Group

He was a fantastic partner to work with, as happy helping us think about how to present ideas as rolling up his sleeves and jumping into code. He was comfortable working through hard decisions and making some tough choices, but always kept the well being of the team front of mind.

— Matthew Davy, Product Manager @ Photobox

Marco inherited a team with low morale and in his own words leading “a group of people who happen to work together rather than a team”. He moved quickly to create a solid team structure and we’re all heading in the right direction because of the hard work and effort he put in.

— Lee Davis, Senior Software Engineer @ Condé Nast

We had a need to bring someone new into the team, who could take a lead across the web front end code base, and lead a team across the stack. That person needed to be pragmatic and be able to judge what to adopt and how to shape the stack with a focus on simplification. Marco led the team in that direction, with a mix of practices for the whole team, and his own code.

— Rich Pearce, CTO @ CrowdCube

He was the driver of the whole team, being at the same time a terrific team leader, a meticulous architect and a great pair programming buddy. He easily instilled all his passion about the front-end world to me and the whole team.

— Rocco Curcio, Senior Javascript Engineer @ Yoox