Silvio Valerio De Pasquale

Early Years and Education

I've been fascinated by technology since childhood—building PCs at 12, mastering both Windows and Linux, obsessed with making systems work well. What drew me in wasn't just making things work; it was making them work efficiently with clean configurations.

After studying Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where my thesis focused on approximate computing algorithms (accepting small compromises in precision for exponential performance gains), I joined Reply as a cloud infrastructure developer in 2015. This was when cloud computing was still nascent in Italy, with most companies running physical data centers.

Consulting Years

I spent five years in consulting, migrating enterprises from private data centers to Oracle Cloud, becoming the go-to engineer for major clients across real estate, insurance, healthcare, and energy. I learned to lead teams, collaborate with CTOs and stakeholders, and navigate complex client relationships.

But I missed the hands-on, deep technical work that drew me to engineering. In 2020, during COVID, I joined Satispay—a payments company barely known outside Italy at the time. It was a radical shift from the enterprise world I'd grown accustomed to.

Building at Scale

I joined as Satispay's first DevOps engineer, initially working solo on infrastructure supporting nearly 1 million users. I transformed their AWS setup: implemented Infrastructure as Code across the platform, overhauled CI/CD pipelines, redesigned network architecture, built comprehensive monitoring and alerting from scratch, and established disaster recovery strategies.

Eventually, I realized I couldn't do it all alone. So I started building a team. Today, that team has grown to over 10 people, and managing it has become a full-time job. Together, we've built a gold-standard microservices infrastructure—containers, APM, advanced monitoring, robust data platform, security hardening, and sophisticated CI/CD—supporting 5+ million users, billions of transactions, and terabytes of data daily with exceptional reliability.

Looking Forward

In 2025, I became a father—a milestone that's given me a fresh perspective on balancing technical excellence with what truly matters. From assembling PCs as a teenager to managing cloud platforms at scale, I remain driven by the same passion: understanding how things work and making them better.