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Massimiliano Pippi

Engineering Lead

Contacts

Skills

  • Programming: Python (expert), Golang (proficient), C, C++ (prior experiences).
  • Management: I managed distributed teams in the range of 4 to 12 people.

Writings

I’m the author of Python for Google App Engine, published by Packt in January, 2015, ISBN 13: 9781784398194

Experience

LlamaIndex, SF (Remote)

Founding Engineer 6/2024 - 9/2025

Working on the Open Source Al framework LlamaIndex, I introduced the Workflows concept, a novel abstraction designed to ease the development of Al applications. Workflows became a foundational part of the project and were also featured in our Series A announcement.

I deeply refactored the LlamaDeploy project, introducing new concepts like the Api Server in order to achieve my vision of Al workloads deployment at scale.

As a founding engineer in a small team working at a very fast pace, I also had the chance to work on the platform backend, security compliance, developers tooling and blog authoring.

deepset, Berlin (Remote)

Team Lead, Open Source Engineering 5/2022 - 6/2024

Working on the Open Source NLP framework Haystack, I was responsible for its major rewrite, released in March 2024 with the version 2.0.0. I influenced and designed many of the key concepts introduced with the new version, making the framework flexible and extensible.

On top of shaping and leading the technical vision for Haystack, being part of an early stage startup, I was responsible of several aspects of my team:

  • In collaboration with several stakeholders: defining, planning and executing the product roadmap
  • Developing talent, establishing career goals and growth plans for the engineers reporting to me
  • Hiring

Elastic, Remote

Senior Engineering Manager 7/2020 - 5/2022

Led a fast-paced, globally distributed team working on the infrastructure monitoring features of the Observability Solution, I was responsible for:

  • Developing talent through coaching and mentoring, establishing career goals and growth plans
  • Collaborating with product management to develop and implement our roadmap through planning and prioritisation
  • Ensuring efficient delivery of our goals within time-boxed releases
  • Improving communication, hiring, and onboarding processes as the team scaled

Arduino, Turin (Remote)

Senior Software Engineer 6/2019-7/2020

Led the refactoring of the Arduino CLI, an open source core product written in Golang that sits behind the new Pro IDE and Arduino’s SaaS offer. Reshaped the infrastructure and delivery pipeline of our SaaS products on top of Kubernetes, Ambassador, Helm and GitHub Actions in order to:

  • reduce the time to market of new features and bug fixes
  • easily deliver POCs and POVs
  • support backend and frontend engineers deploying software with confidence
  • make observability first class citizen

Datadog, NYC (Remote)

Staff Engineer 1/2019-5/2019

Designed and implemented the strategy to transition the Python interpreter embedded with the Datadog Agent from version 2.7 to version 3.7. Main goal was to minimize impact on users during the transition: the project involved tricky technical problems to be solved, a plan to roll out the feature in time before Python 2 was retired while facing the challenges of an invasive refactoring performed on a codebase that was under heavy development.

Datadog, NYC (Remote)

Engineering Team Lead 4/2018 - 1/2019

Took the lead of a brand new team focused on delivering the new Agent based integrations while keeping existing ones up and running. I gave priority to making the process frictionless for engineers, introducing idiomatic tools and new workflows aimed to ease the work on a local dev environment. The feedback from people contributing to the codebase was very positive and my mentoring efforts were extremely rewarding with one intern hired full time at the end of her internship.

Datadog, Paris then NYC (Remote)

Engineering Team Lead 4/2017 - 4/2018

Team lead for the Agent and Integrations engineering team, we delivered version 6.0 of the Datadog Agent in February 2018. Designed and started the refactoring of Agent based integrations from single-module Python files to wheel packages (https://github.com/DataDog/integrations-core). Transitioned a small team of 2 engineers working on container-specific Integrations into a full-fledged engineering team.

Datadog, Paris

Software Engineer 2/2016 - 4/2017

Worked in the Agent and Integrations team on metrics collection. Authored the first version of the Kubernetes State agent check and the AWS ECS crawler. Designed and implemented the port of the Datadog Agent to Golang (https://github.com/DataDog/datadog-agent).

Self Employed (Remote)

Software Engineer 5/2015- 1/2016

Involved in several projects as a consultant, mostly on backend web services written in Python and Django.

Evonove, Perugia

Cofounder and Tech Lead 1/2010 - 4/2015

Involved in several projects managing people, writing Python (mostly Django) and C++ code (mostly Qt), deploying web applications, integrating software components, and writing documentation. I was responsible for choosing tools and technologies.

Molecular Discovery Ltd, London (Remote)

Software Engineer 1/2010 - 4/2015

I developed multiplatform, commercial cheminformatic desktop softwares with Qt libraries in C and C++. I worked in a team environment under short deadlines in more than a project.

Education

University of Perugia, B.Sc. Computer Science.

Languages

  • English: fluent.
  • French: knowledge “de base”.

Projects

  • Workflows: an event-driven, async-first, step-based way to control the execution flow of Al applications like agents.
  • Banks: a Python library based on Jinja providing a set of tools to ease the generation and management of meaningful LLM prompts.
  • masci/datadog: a Github Action to publish Datadog metrics and events from GitHub workflows.
  • Haystack: an orchestration framework to build customizable, production-ready LLM applications.

Certifications

  • RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer, certificate n. 111-175-410 obtained October 28, 2011

Community Initiatives

  • 2014-2015 DjangoVillage Member of the organization committee of the first italian Django Conference officially supported by the Django Software Foundation. http://2014.djangovillage.it
  • 2013-2015 Tinker Garage APS I was the Chairman of a non-profit organization involved in the promotion of new technologies in schools.