Riccardo Palleschi

I’m a backend software engineer with 5 years of experience, based in Italy. I work at Leithà (opens in a new tab) on the backend of BeRebel (opens in a new tab), an insurtech app with 70k+ monthly active users. I take responsibility for features from figuring out what to build to running them in production, making the technical decisions and working through dependencies with other teams.

One thing I’m proud of is cutting our AWS bill by six figures a year. Some of it was hiding in plain sight, like resources nobody remembered creating, or a query touring the whole table for a single row. The rest meant going through the bill line by line and digging into indexes, storage classes and access patterns. I enjoy getting far enough into a problem to understand what actually needs changing, whether that means rethinking an approach or deleting code that no longer needs to exist.

I got into programming early through Minecraft plugins, GTA V modding, a jailbroken iPod, a rooted Galaxy S4 and whatever made me curious at the time. I was always more interested in changing how things worked than using them the way they came.

I’m also studying Management and Artificial Intelligence at LUISS (opens in a new tab). I was already working as a software engineer when I enrolled and wanted to study something broader than CS. Outside of work, I train and listen to a lot of techno.