Silvio Valerio De Pasquale

Early Years and Education

I built my first PC at twelve and spent my teens tinkering with Windows and Linux. Getting things to run was the easy part. I cared about getting them to run properly, with clean and efficient setups.

I studied Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, with a thesis on approximate computing algorithms: trading a little precision for large performance gains. In 2015 I joined Reply as a cloud infrastructure developer, back when most Italian companies still ran their own data centers and cloud was a novelty.

Consulting Years

I spent five years in consulting, moving enterprise clients from private data centers to Oracle Cloud. Over time I became the reference engineer for large accounts in real estate, insurance, healthcare and energy, and I learned to lead teams and work directly with CTOs and stakeholders.

The work was good, but I missed being hands-on. In 2020, in the middle of COVID, I joined Satispay, a payments company that few people outside Italy knew at the time. Coming from the enterprise world, it was a radical change.

Building at Scale

I joined as Satispay's first DevOps engineer, alone on an infrastructure serving almost a million users. Over the following years I rebuilt most of the AWS setup: Infrastructure as Code everywhere, new CI/CD pipelines, a redesigned network architecture, monitoring and alerting built from scratch, and a real disaster recovery strategy.

At some point it became clear I couldn't do it all alone, so I started hiring. That team now counts more than ten people, and managing it is my full-time job. The platform we run today supports over 5 million users, billions of transactions and terabytes of data every day.

Looking Forward

I became a father in 2025, which changed how I balance work with everything else. The rest hasn't changed much: I still enjoy understanding how things work and making them better, the same as when I was assembling PCs as a teenager.