Marco Albarelli

Infrastructure & Security · Applied AI · Now starting something new

I keep systems running, secure and auditable, and I automate whatever I can.

I've spent more than twenty years in hands-on IT, covering infrastructure engineering, security compliance, development and process automation. These days I mostly work on putting LLMs into real operational workflows.

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About

I have a cross-functional "full-stack IT" profile. I'm as comfortable configuring servers and networks as I am writing automation scripts, designing data pipelines or sitting with an auditor going through ISO 27001 controls. I handle both the strategic direction and the day-to-day execution.

Lately I've been focused on applied artificial intelligence. I design and deploy automated workflows on the Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, for document handling, reporting, decision support and agentic task automation. I don't see AI as a future trend; I use it every day to get more done.

On the security side I've maintained ISO 27001 certifications, run GDPR compliance programmes and operated SIEM monitoring. I care about technical depth, and also about policy, documentation and being ready for an audit.

I like being part of the community. I organised BUG, the Backend Users Group, a spin-off of the FEVR meetup in Verona. I've also helped organise some of Italy's best-known developer conferences: jsDay, phpDay, Node.js Conf and ReactJS Day.

Based in Verona, Italy, and happy to travel across the EU, UK and USA. I'm a native Italian speaker and fluent in English (C1+).

Skills

Experience

  1. Next: an Italian startup, currently in stealth mode

    From late 2026 · Italy

    I've just started a new adventure. More here once it's public.

  2. Senior SRE Manager — Ping Identity

    Jan 2026 – Oct 2026 · USA (remote)

    After Ping Identity acquired Keyless, I took on both infrastructure management and security leadership for the former Keyless product line.

    • Led a team of 7 SRE Managers.
    • Led AI/LLM adoption across engineering, with automated pipelines for documentation, incident analysis and code review.
    • Acted as Security Champion for the Keyless product domain: vulnerability management, security policy, and alignment with enterprise compliance.
    • Pushed a shift-left approach through mentoring and tooling: automated security checks, better observability, and preventing incidents before they happen.
    • Integrated the legacy Keyless architecture into the wider Ping platform.

  3. Infrastructure & Security Lead — Keyless Technologies

    Sep 2023 – Dec 2025 · Italy

    Owned infrastructure, security operations and compliance end to end at a biometric authentication company.

    • Maintained ISO 27001 certification end to end: tooling (Sprinto), documentation, and internal and external audits.
    • Ran GDPR compliance across platform data flows, access controls and data handling policies.
    • Led the migration from AWS Auto Scaling Groups to EKS with Istio and Flux GitOps, making deployments more reliable and easier to audit.
    • Operated SIEM and monitoring pipelines for incident detection, response and post-mortems.
    • Brought LLM tooling into engineering workflows, which cut the time spent on docs, runbooks and infrastructure reviews.

  4. Head of IT Operations — Milkman

    Apr 2019 – 2023 · Italy

    Milkman sells logistics software as a service. When parcels are on the line, the systems simply have to work. I joined as Senior Architect on a six-month freelance contract, then stayed on as an employee to lead IT operations while volumes grew sharply.

    • Redesigned the infrastructure architecture around fully containerised, immutable services on autoscaling ECS Fargate clusters. I used managed services wherever possible to keep both costs and staffing down.
    • Led the Infra & Platform team, which also owned developer experience: internal bots and automation.
    • Set up QA, a dedicated Support team, Ops, Infra & Platform and the use of external contractors, none of which existed when I arrived. Each grew into a team led by people promoted from within, because I take "make yourself redundant" quite literally.
    • Guided the move to a streaming architecture on Kafka (Amazon MSK).
    • Owned security and GDPR compliance: policies and procedures, penetration tests, risk assessments and a shift-left approach.

  5. Freelance and tech lead roles

    2016 – 2019 · Italy & remote

    • Senior developer, then Tech Lead — Opencontent · Jul 2016 – Apr 2019
      Moved the platform to AWS and microservices, and built SPID login (the Italian public administration's SAML identity system) for local public administrations. Open-sourced spid-php-lib and spid-symfony-bundle under the Italian government's GitHub organisation.
    • Senior Backend Engineer — Toptal (core team, remote) · Jan – Jul 2018
      Designed and built architectural solutions, mostly backend JavaScript with some Go.
    • Senior Node.js developer — Digital Lighting · Jul 2016 – Jul 2018
      A microservices backend with message queues and shared service discovery.
    • Senior Node.js developer — Rdcom · Oct 2016 – Jul 2017
      Broke a legacy monolith into Node.js microservices.
    • Olimpiadi di Italiano · Jan – Mar 2017
      Built the platform for a national Italian-language competition for schools on AWS, with Node.js and RethinkDB. It handled 60,000 students logging in over two days, in batches of 15,000.
    • Senior PHP developer — Madisoft · Mar – Jul 2016
      Migrated nuvola, a school e-register with around 4 million users, from PHP 5.5 and Symfony 2 to PHP 7 and Symfony 3. I also replaced the cross-shard replication between its per-client databases.
    • Node.js developer — Sushijet · Jan 2016
      A fast, test-driven rewrite of a sushi-delivery startup's real-time backend.

  6. Earlier career

    1994 – 2016 · Italy

    • Node.js developer — Yippie! (Amsterdam, remote) · Oct 2015 – Mar 2016
      Microservices on AWS, and a streaming BI pipeline feeding Kibana.
    • Project Manager & senior developer — IKS S.r.l. · Sep 2014 – Jul 2015
      Introduced agile practices and TDD to the team.
    • Freelance developer & sysadmin · Mar 2010 – Aug 2014
      Android/NFC apps, Symfony and WordPress projects, Linux hosting, and a Facebook-login coupon platform for Wishdays.
    • Web developer & sysadmin — Netwise · Jul 2009 – Feb 2010
    • Web developer — Ready Net · Apr 2008 – Jul 2009
    • Developer & DBA — Assconsult S.r.l. (insurance) · Nov 2003 – Mar 2008
      My first IT job. I brought the company's monthly mass mailing in-house, which saved money and allowed new mailing templates.
    • Clerk, hi-fi department — Emmezeta · Feb 2002 – Nov 2003
    • Officer, Bersaglieri — Italian Army (military service) · Oct 1994 – Mar 1996

    Selected projects from that period

    • A B2B shipment-tracking platform for a major Italian dairy producer, where I was both PM and senior developer. Drivers scanned signed delivery papers in a mobile app, matched by barcode to SAP data. It had a Symfony2 REST backend and an Angular admin interface, all built with TDD on a kanban process.
    • Authentication and authorization for a Kibana fork: OpenID Connect login plus per-user filtering of Elasticsearch queries, with the rules stored in MongoDB.
    • A Go ETL pipeline from MongoDB to Elasticsearch.
    • Project manager for LinkoMyCity, a citizen-facing mobile app published on the app stores.

Education

  1. Bachelor's degree in Sociology — University of Trento

    2000

  2. Maturità scientifica — Liceo E. Medi, Garda

    High school diploma, science track

Latest writing

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Contact

The quickest way to reach me is by email: info@marcoalbarelli.eu.

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