Cristiano Balducci

Summary

I help software engineers to grow in their careers, teams to become more autonomous and organisations to become more resilient. All while delivering high quality software, at pace.

Publications and Conferences

• Spaghetti Management Podcast
• Organiser and Presenter @ DevOps Days Edinburgh
• A framework for impactful sprint goals
• Adopting Rolling Wave planning in Scrum

Skillset

Coach, excellent communicator, enthusiastic about team dynamics and team performances, passionate about Agile. I am a driven individual that highly regards transparency and dependability.

My mixed background in system and software engineering allowed me to develop strong problem solving toolbox. My further career development into engineering leadership gave me the opportunity to build and lead high performance teams of different shapes and sizes.

My main leadership styles are coaching and democratic. I enjoy helping people thinking about how to solve problems and I am deeply convinced that a high performance team is one where there is trust and psychological safety.

Languages

Advanced: Italian, English

Intermediate: Spanish

Beginner: Catalan

Experience

Software Engineering Manager @ Kaluza

10/2020 - Present

Hired as Engineering Manager, part of growth in the local engineering site. Working with stream processing again. Helping my teams to become more autonomous and more resilient. Managed 2 full remote team. Contributed to a reorg which resulted in me managing the merging of two (different) teams to form a third one. Lot of focus on Operational Excellence, giving my team and neighboring teams the tools to improve the quality of the systems they build. Played an important part in updating our Enginering and Leadership Competency Framework.

Co-founder and Co-host @ Spaghetti Management Podcast

10/2020 - Present

Created Spaghetti Management, a podcast about management targeting Italian speaking engineering leaders. On top of being an enjoyable creative outlet, it has also proven useful as a way of consolidating my learnings and debating my ideas with my co-host.

Squad Lead @ SkyScanner

10/2018 - 10/2020

Hired as squad lead in the Engines Tribe, developing the core systems that make Skyscanner work. A lot of stream processing, working with frontend and backend events. Decommissioned some legacy systems, resuling in some tangible economic savings. Lead an initiative solving an unbounded problem on revenue tracking, successfully. Half way in my tenure, moved from managing a co-located team to managing a full remote team, which did not stopped us from getting 2 promotions in! Learnt a lot about building high performing teams by building one.

Engineering Manager @ NCR

02/2016 - 10/2018

Hired as Senior DevOps Engineer with focus on big data technology. Strictly collaborated with the Unified Logging team helping them streamline their delivery practices. Built tooling with the team, allowing the management of the Cloudera instances the team managed via infrastructure as code. In the last 2 years I became engineering leader for the Engineering Operations team, building tooling for the other engineering teams in the org. I was responsible for the team's engineers career development, the team's well being and, obviously, for delivery. People manager, technical lead and agile coach, all in one package.

Various Roles @ NoemaLife

12/2008 - 12/2015

System Engineering Team Lead

Head of a team aimed to implement and maintain Customer’s infrastructure functional to NoemaLife Spa solutions. Used various enterprise level technologies such as VmWare ESX, Oracle RDBMS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat HA Suite, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster. In this role my team contributed to 24/7 availability for both Operating System and RDBMS problems.

System Architect & System Engineer

This role’s main task is supporting Foreign Sales Department and the Bid Management Department, designing the IT Architectures to be proposed.

Education

University Of Bologna, Computer Science, 2001-2008