Detailed career

Engineering and Product + AI Sitter @welance. Based in Berlin, Germany and Alta Langa, Italy. Italian. Working with teams across the EU and the world since 2006, mostly as a consultant, often as a co-founder.

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Now

2012 – present

welance

Co-founder · CTO / Principal Engineer · Engineering and Product + AI Sitter
Berlin, Germany · Lequio Berria, Italy · remote

A collective of hand-picked independent professionals acting as a full-service digital agency: consulting, technology, UI/UX, marketing, DevOps, CMS. I restructure and maintain the collective's own engineering and strategy, and the digital products derived from it, for the collective and for its clients.

Started in 2017 with a design system and development guidelines so the community could streamline (and automate) repeating work; enlarged the tech offer and stack in 2021; today that structure lets any welance member develop the company's framework further.

Day to day: budget and resource allocation for 40+ people, shared processes and guidelines, client acquisition and relationships, cashflow, several projects and teams in parallel, and, lately, supervising AI agents that do a good share of the typing. Since 2022 Welance Ventures Italia also works with rural municipalities on digital solutions that improve rural life, as one of the first rural digital hubs.

2022 – present

welance · Agency ERP + Developer Platform

Product Manager
remote

After 250+ clients, managing an agency had become chaos. Fixing that chaos produced an internal, Directus-based tool (think Vercel + Linear + ERP) that we're now happy to show and share with digital agencies like ours.

2023 – present

Rural Pop-Up

Founder, rural development
Alta Langa, Piedmont, Italy

Rural development starts from infrastructure. We collected rural public places that never existed on Google Maps and made them accessible to the general public (a PNRR project). I'm also an early co-founder and, these days, a quiet supporting member of Langa Silvatica, a volunteer association that protects the woods, meadows and springs of the Langhe.

2019 – present

Doi Fagnán · Residenza di Campagna

Co-founder
Lequio Berria, Piedmont, Italy

Living isolated is great; exchanging experience with people from all over the world is also great. So we renovated a stone house from 1790 in 40 hectares of woodland and opened it to guests, fast Wi-Fi included. Come meet me.

2014 – present

Stood.it

Co-founder
Berlin, Germany · Torino, Italy

A design monobrand of wooden office objects, B2C and B2B. A test project that “just worked” and became a small business; I set up branding, e-commerce, customer acquisition, materials, CNC and logistics, and today it's mainly run by a friend and my partner Giorgia, with the objects still made in Torino with the help of a luthier friend. Early B2B customers include Google, exoclick and Breather.

2006 – present

Independent

Software development · Fractional CTO
EU / world

As part of a solid network of consultants I've been on small-to-huge internet projects since 2006, mainly in Italy, Germany and Switzerland.

Agencies and organisations include GetUnik (Red Cross, Amnesty International, Salvation Army, Caritas, Save the Children…), Vyking (infrastructure, RBAC B2B dashboard), Acker (data platform for teaching tools, learning platform, multi-site), GPPi, Highsnobiety and more.

Earlier

Apr 2018 – Dec 2019

æternity (with Ape Unit)

Senior JavaScript developer, SDK, developer tools, documentation
Berlin, Germany

Open-source JavaScript SDK and developer toolkits to ease the use of æternity's blockchain and the apps built on it; onboarding of new developers through tooling and technical documentation. Functional programming, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD with Jenkins, AWS.

2009 – 2016

ShareDesk → Optix (AppQii Technology Inc.)

Co-founder & CPO, shareholder since 2016
Vancouver, Canada · San Francisco, USA · Berlin

My first venture, described by Forbes in 2012 as the “Airbnb for flexible workplaces”; $1.1M seed round led by Tim Draper's DFJ; after almost eight years of teamwork, a leading position in its industry.

I followed the full lifecycle of both products: ShareDesk, the marketplace for shared workspaces, and Optix, the web/iOS/Android platform for managing office space, communication and utilisation. Team creation and lead, budget, UX and design, strategy, product timeline, investor expectations.

2017

BusRapido

Mentor
Italy

Mentored an Italian bus-travel startup, later acquired by BusForFun.

2015

Digital Nomad Survey

Founder
Berlin, Germany · worldwide

An open-data experiment on a trending topic: 40 questions, 700+ responses, ~1,400 unique visitors (a 50% conversion rate) and 95% of participants leaving their e-mail. Idea, sponsorship, promotion and coordination until completion; a second edition followed with a partner.

2009 – 2012

Brand-Catcher · Maxema

Full-stack developer, analyst and advisor
Berlin, Germany (remote) · Torino, Italy

In a team put together by a renowned design studio, I built the online presence of two brands from scratch, two custom platforms, no CMS or framework: a retail startup's e-commerce and a traditional B2B reseller app. Working next to complex UI/UX tied to a branding strategy is where my focus shifted towards the front-end and design in software.

2009 – 2010

Bakeca.it · Easybit

Developer
Torino, Italy

Easybit is the web agency behind Bakeca, which quickly became Italy's leading classifieds site. Back-end for Bakeca, optimising complex queries and extending the core of a large OOP PHP application under high traffic and constantly growing databases (Apache Solr), and full-stack for Easybit, building sites for small-to-large enterprises with an XML-based Java generator.

2006 – 2009

Independent

Full-stack web and software developer
Torino, Italy

Right after school: web development (ASP, HTML, JS) and software (Visual Basic) for small companies and associations, plus print design and corporate identities. Learning to find clients, work with external agencies and run a self-employed business.

2004 – 2005

Unieuro IT department · GameStop

Systems and network maintenance · Store manager
Alba, Italy

Servers, computers and network for Unieuro's ~500-person headquarters. The IT team was essential to physical store set-ups and openings: sys-administering the central servers right next to the server room, preparing hundreds of computers to ship for a new store opening, fixing the network and finding solutions for the offices' everyday IT and software issues.

Then, at GameStop, a team of five and the daily business of a videogame store.

Mentoring & advising

Startup advisor and shareholder (AppQii, Tillairplant); occasional advice to early-stage startups struggling to bootstrap.

Open source

Stack

JavaScript / TypeScript, Node.js, Vue / Nuxt, PHP, MySQL, REST APIs, Directus and other headless CMS, Craft and WordPress, Docker, Kubernetes / Rancher, AWS, Cloudflare, CI/CD, and, since 2023, AI agents, MCP servers and AI-assisted delivery.

Education

Languages

Italian
native
English
professional
Spanish
good understanding, basic spoken
German
elementary
French
elementary

Interests

Among literally everything in this life, if I really need to pick interests for my personal page I'd pick: Organisational Processes, AI-Assisted Engineering, Rural Development, Regenerative Agriculture, Woodland Conservation, Food, Wine, Cats and ChillMaxxxing.

Get in touch

E-mail enrico@welance.com, book a 30-minute call, or find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.