Alessandro Romano

Insightful. Precise. Human.

• Location: Milan, Lombardy, Italy
• Email: write me
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alessandroromano92
• Website: aleromano.com

Summary

I love to help people collaborate better. I’m addicted to details and obsessed with how things work: from Cloud services to human relationships. Since my first Hello World in RPG Maker, I have come to believe that being an Engineer is much more than coding. I strongly believe people come before processes and tools and I think great Team Work wins over individual contribution.

Work Experience

Senior Engineering Manager & Milan Hub Site Lead

Mollie, Milan (IT) | 2025/03 - present

I was promoted to Engineering Leader of the Merchant Monitoring domain. I currently manage two Engineering Managers and still have one team reporting directly to me. As Milan Hub Site Lead, I handle all operational and bureaucratic topics, aiming to make the Hub an outstanding place to work.

Main achievements:

• We kicked off an experiment to offer cash advances using internal funding instead of relying solely on our third-party provider. The MVP performed so well that we built a dedicated team around it, generating 200k in fee revenue within six months. Along the way, we also launched our own Probability of Default model.
• We built a near-real-time monitoring system from scratch, fully integrated with our newly launched Business Account. It lets us review both SEPA transfers and card transactions in under 100 ms. The architecture is designed so a Machine Learning model can be plugged in easily in the coming months. This began as a regulatory requirement, and I influenced the decision to build it in-house instead of using existing third-party solutions. We delivered it on time for our go-to-market.
• We are developing a Dispute Management system with public APIs and a dedicated UI in the Mollie Dashboard. Other domains postponed this project for two years; once assigned to us, we pushed it into full-speed delivery. Public beta is planned for Q1 2026. The goal is to increase dispute win rates for our merchants and potentially generate revenue in the future.
• We are close to launching a multi-agent AI system that automatically evaluates the majority of our financial crime cases. It is already auto-closing cases where a separate model calculates a very low probability of being reportable. A sample of these auto-closed cases is reviewed by our QA team, and results have been extremely encouraging. The whole system was built during an innovation week, a moment when we deliberately create mental space for teams to explore unconventional approaches, especially in areas where our existing solutions are perfectly functional but clearly suboptimal.
• I led the Milan Hub’s growth from 8 to 70+ employees in a single year, including opening a new office in downtown Milan.

Engineering Manager

Mollie, Milan (IT) | 2023/12 - 2025/03

I manage three teams in the Merchant Monitoring domain, making sure bad actors stay out of our door.

Main achievements:

• Brought all monitoring and alerting tools for money laundering and terrorism financing in-house, blending deterministic logic with Machine Learning. This saved 130k per year and let us tailor the monitoring stack to new Mollie products, especially non-payment ones.
• Delivered a fraud-focused Machine Learning model for onboarding signals. This cut our fraud-related financial losses from 500k per year to 170k per year.
• Built an internal Sanctions Screening tool, including a full ETL pipeline connected to public sanctions lists and a fuzzy-matching algorithm. It became a key asset for the Customer Due Diligence team, allowing deep sanctions checks across our entire merchant base in hours instead of days.
• Rolled out a Case Management System for all Operational teams, integrated with our automated decisioning engine. When a human needs to step in, the system centralizes every relevant piece of information, enabling fast, well-informed decisions without relying on external tools. This reduced investigation time for complex financial-crime cases from weeks to days.

Head of Engineering

Banca AideXa, Milan (IT) | 2020/10 - 2023/12

I was able to achieve great results thanks to the amazing team I created, led, and managed.

Together, we accomplished the following:

• Released 4 different Lending products (unsecured and with external guarantees) within the first year of Banca AideXa in order to find product-market fit while coping with the pandemic (closing 2021 with 80 million of loans disbursed and 2.000 unique customers). In 2022 we built 2 new medium-to-long-term loan products achieving a 3x in unique customers and 4x in loans disbursed.
• Additionally, we delivered a Bank Deposit Account product.
• Integrated HubSpot to improve loan application review. The final decision time for secured loans reduced from 3 to 2 weeks (avg).
• Progressively insourced the core skills needed to build our products (2 Tech Leaders, 3 Software Eng, 2 Data Eng, 1 Platform Eng, 1 QA Eng, 1 HubSpot Eng).
• We shifted to a Team Augmentation model and reviewed our external consultants.
• Created an End-to-End testing automation platform, achieving 100% coverage on Credit Decision APIs and lowering the CFR to 13%.
• Setup an Observability Platform for proactive error handling, reducing Bugfixing Cycle Time to 2 days.
• Defined an API strategy around Domains and Bounded Contexts. It became a new revenue stream by the end of 2023 with a pay-per-usage model.
• Managed a 3.5 million budget identifying CAPEX/OPEX expenses, focusing on the return on investment.
• We decreased costs on third-party pay-per-usage by shifting to a forfeit model (plus an aggressive cache policy) resulting in a 17% savings.
• Defined Software Engineering guidelines standardizing the Tech Stack, implementing eXtreme Programming techniques, Architecture Decision Records.
• Regularly involved all the AideXers in monthly Open Forums about Tech topics relevant to the Business, opening the field to GenAI usage.
• Implemented new policies and processes using automation to stay compliant with banking regulations (monthly checking 3rd parties respecting SLAs).

Engineering Manager

lastminute.com, Chiasso (CH) | 2019/04 - 2020/09

My role is a very unique one. Let’s sum it up in a sentence: I help people shine.

What the team and I achieved together (top 3):

• Created real-time buying for luggage in post-sale through My lastminute.com area so that no phone calls are required anymore. Sold more than 9k baggage in 2019 with a conversion rate above 13%.
• Migrated 300k customers from weg.de (7pass auth system) to lastminute.com Auth System with 0 downtimes for customers.
• Migrated 830k bookings from weg.de platform (Midoco) to lastminute.com one hiding the SOAP-based system (Midoco) behind a Push System.

How I lead:

• I’m responsible for the Team’s Growth: I have a strong emotional intelligence which I try to improve every day; this allows me to have very effective 1-1 interactions where I help team members make the right direction for their careers development.
• I’m responsible for the technical solutions my team creates: I try to mentor by using pair programming and doing code reviews. I prefer to help the team make a decision rather than taking one on my own.
• I’m responsible for keeping the team committed and efficient as much as possible: I love to create a good environment where everyone feels safe and able to share their ideas. I’m very honest and open in communication as I believe that sharing is the most effective way to empower ownership. I love to analyze data regarding Team Performance, giving and receiving useful feedback during retrospectives.
• I’m responsible for communication: My job is well done when every member of the team (Product Owner, Copywriter, UX Designer, Eng) knows the E2E vision of the Products we are building. I understand that I cannot excel in all those responsibilities at the same time, so I try to grow team members by delegating part of my tasks: every team should have different Tech Leaders and Scrum Masters.

Besides my usual work in the team, I’m an active member of <❤ FrontLovers />, our multi-country Community of Practice regarding FrontEnd topics.

Software Engineer

lastminute.com, Chiasso (CH) | 2017/01 - 2019/04

Started just as Front-End developer, during my journey in lastminute.com I got acquainted with Back-End and Mobile technologies. Right now, I usually develop end-to-end user stories from the REST service to the front-ends. In our team we are very committed to deliver value thanks to eXtreme Programming techniques: pair programming enabled us to share knowledge of the domain and the technology. Typescript helped a lot in destroying the silos of front-end, back-end and mobile developers: we keep specialised in different area, but we tend to improve in every platform.

The two most notable projects we are facing are:

• Progressive migration of an old Backbone-Marionette application to Vanilla + React (using as much Functional Components as possible).
• Enhancement of an already developed mobile app with sections in React-Native.

On the back-end side we are writing as much Kotlin as possible, enjoying its reduced verbosity and good type-inference. I usually play the role of the Scrum master and my aim is to make my team as self-organized as possible so it won’t even need this role at all!

Fullstack Developer

Cornèr Bank via Mac Solutions, Bedano (CH) | 2016/06 - 2016/12

I collaborate in both developing and maintaining Java applications: most of them are built on Spring (3.2) and they’re all bundled with Maven. We develop both for IBM Websphere Application Server and an Enterprise Service Bus running on Apache ServiceMix. My everyday tools are Jenkins, UML, Squirrel, Splunk, Sonar, IBM Rational and Eclipse.

Web Developer

Whirlpool EMEA, Comerio (IT) | 2014/04 - 2014/10

Web development of the Whirlpool EMEA Partner Store web application on IBM Websphere Application Server 8.5.5 Network Deployment.

Web&Mobile Fullstack Developer

Elmec Informatica, Brunello (IT) | 2011/09 - 2016/06

Multiplatform Web and Mobile Front-End development with IBM Worklight, Cordova (Phonegap), HTML5, Javascript, CSS3, Less, Bootstrap, jQuery, jQueryMobile and Framework7. Back-End: Java EE on IBM Websphere Application Server 7.5 and 8.5.5 Network Deployment. Web Server: IBM HTTP Server (Apache). I write English technical articles for the company’s internal magazine.

Web Developer

3i Technology s.r.l, Tradate (IT) | 2011/07 - 2011/08 ASP.NET and VisualBasic.NET Web Development.

Beta Tester (internship)

Alesys Srl, Cavaria con Premezzo (IT) | 2010/12 - 2011/01 Beta-testing of a desktop C business application.

Education

Bachelor Degree Università degli Studi dell’Insubria | 2013/03 - 2018/01 Information Technology

Diploma I.S.I.S J.M. Keynes | 2006/09 - 2011/01 Computer Expert specialized in Web technologies

Speaker

• 2025 - Codemotion (Milan)
• 2024 - Community Day (Milan)
• 2023 - Class CNBC (Milan)
• 2022 - CTO Mastermind (Milan)
• 2018 - Devoxx (Lugano)