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Francesco Meli

Francesco Meli

Full Stack EngineerReggio Emilia, Italy

I cannot look at anything for long without working out how I would model it and store it: a factory floor, an immersive theatre installation, or whatever I've decided to automate at home.

Stubborn and pragmatic, never afraid to take a thing apart to put it back better. Stateless is a religion.

13+
Years of experience
27+
Technologies used
8
Positions held
Get in touchDownload CV

Where I've worked

Work

Beefree

No-code email builder, 230K+ users, part of the Growens martech group

Apr 2021 · Present

Milan, Lombardia

  • moved to Technical Lead
  • team: the frontend team's point of reference, interviews new hires
  • product: built the AI Co-Pilot that designs marketing emails
  • product: built the MCP server exposing RGE Studio as tools
  • tooling: built a tool that tracks deploys and drafts the release notes
  • moved to Senior Full Stack Engineer
  • state: replaced the Beefree app's custom store with Zustand
  • routing: rebuilt the Beefree app's routing on React Router 6
  • sdk: rewrote the Beefree SDK embed into a reusable component
  • joined as Senior Frontend Engineer
  • build: replaced Create React App with an owned webpack config
  • auth: built the sign-in library shared across Beefree apps
ReactTypeScriptSassPythonDjangoTemporalPostgreSQLDockerGitHubGitHub ActionsAWSCypress

Connected Pet

Pet insurance bought online in a single flow

Oct 2023 · Dec 2023

Phoenix, Arizona, USA

  • hired as freelancer as Senior Frontend Engineer
  • product: built the insurance purchase flow end to end
  • api: got the quote API redesigned stateless
ReactTypeScriptSassPythonDockerGitHub
The Toto quote, end to end: describing a Golden Retriever, watching the monthly premium answer a change of deductible and a wellness add-on, adding a cat for the multi-pet discount, then checking out into a policy. Recorded against a mocked API, so the premiums are invented rather than real quotes.

Fees

Business expense-management software, with receipt OCR

May 2022 · Sep 2023

Crema, Italy

  • hired as freelancer as Senior Full Stack Engineer
  • port: commissioned feesCAN's port to Python, followed weekly
  • delivery: dockerized every app and automated the deploy pipeline
  • support: fixed a security audit's findings, plus features and bugs
AngularIonicPythonPHPDockerGitHubGitHub ActionsAWSPortainer

B2Z Insurance

Small-business insurance sold online

Jun 2021 · May 2022

Schaumburg, Illinois, USA

  • hired as freelancer as Senior Full Stack Engineer
  • product: built the customer quote-and-buy flow
  • admin: built the internal admin for campaigns, leads and claims
ReactTypeScriptSassReduxExpressDockerGitLab

Officine Facco

Automated poultry and egg-farming systems

Jan 2020 · Apr 2021

Campo San Martino, PD, Italy

  • joined as Senior Full Stack Developer
  • portal: finished the Portal, the hub for the Smart Black Boxes
  • team: led three external consultants to release new features
ReactSassReduxPythonDjangoPostgreSQLRedisInfluxDBDockerGitLab
The Portal, from a customer's side: the boxes on every farm reporting in, the documents published against one house filed by project phase, the order behind it opened a phase at a time, and Supervise reaching a Smart Black Box in a shed to frame the box's own interface

Facco USA

Officine Facco's North American operation

Dec 2016 · Jan 2020

Chicago, Illinois, USA

  • joined as Mid-Level Full Stack Developer
  • product: built the Smart Black Box, the on-site app in every shed
  • drivers: built a Python driver for each farm controller
  • infra: migrated the US data center's services to Italy HQ
ReactSassReduxPythonDjangoPostgreSQLRedisInfluxDBDockerGitLab
The Smart Black Box: the house at a glance, a month of it pulled apart by dragging across a curve, the barn seen from above, and the controller tags, alarms, settings and recipes underneath

Elettric 80

Factory automation and warehouse robotics

Nov 2014 · Dec 2016

Skokie, Illinois, USA

  • also took on Junior Full Stack Developer
  • product: built Convergence, the customer support ticketing system
  • joined as PC Engineer
  • install: configured vehicle managers and multi-axis labellers on site
SassjQueryPHPLaravelC#mySQLMSSQLGitHubSubversion
The Convergence helpdesk: the ticket queue, a ticket and its thread, a customer and their machines, and the statistics behind the team
Source on GitHub

Intecom

Web and e-commerce development studio

Mar 2013 · Nov 2014

Reggio nell'Emilia, Italy

  • joined as Junior Web Developer
  • product: wrote several custom PHP applications, server and client side
  • e-commerce: launched the Tecnocomputer store on Magento
jQueryPHPmySQLGitHub
Education

Università di Parma

Public research university in Parma, Italy

Sep 2011 · Jul 2013

Parma, Italy

  • Bachelor of Science: Computer Engineering
  • thesis: "Timelapse camera dolly cart"
Read the thesis

San Diego City College

Public community college in San Diego

Sep 2009 · Sep 2011

San Diego, CA, USA

  • Associate of Science: Computer Engineering
  • coursework: programming, mathematics and computer architecture

Kaplan Aspect

Intensive English-language school

Oct 2008 · Jun 2009

San Diego, CA, USA

  • TOEFL: English
  • language: an intensive English proficiency programme

Istituto Blaise Pascal

Technical secondary school in computer science and telecoms

Sep 2003 · Jul 2008

Reggio Emilia, Italy

  • High School Diploma: Computer Science
  • curriculum: five-year technical track in CS and telecommunications
  • foundations: networking, Pascal, assembly, JavaScript and PHP

What I build anyway

crew

Local dev on a distributed stack

Fifteen services in the stack and today you are touching two. crew reads the env files each project already ships, works out from them who calls whom, and makes every service a switch: flip one on and it runs locally with every peer rewritten to point at your machine, leave it off and it stays on the deployed environment, callers untouched.

Node.jsCLIZero dependencies
WebsiteSourcenpm

hoomes

Full text search over Italian property listings

Italian property portals let you filter by price, rooms and square metres, and not at all by the description, which is exactly where the garden and the panoramic view and the needs-work get mentioned. This scrapes the listings off the portals and puts full text search over the part nobody indexes.

ReactTypeScriptPythonPostgreSQLRedisDocker
Live appSource

nocanonetv.it

The yearly reminder nobody sends you

The Italian TV licence is charged on the electricity bill, and the exemption for not owning a television has to be re-filed every single year: miss the window and it quietly comes back. This watches the calendar instead. Pick the case that applies, confirm by email, and next December it asks the one question that decides it, then sends you to the Agenzia delle Entrate to sign the declaration yourself.

ReactTypeScriptPythonFastAPIPostgreSQLDocker
Live appSource

Il Giardino delle Cose Sperse

A room that keeps what people tell it

An immersive piece for a theatre collective, built around a radio of memories. Visitors record something they have lost at a station and it joins the pool, heard on headphones there and through the room at once. The mix is set before the piece goes live, never during. The same panel moderates what arrives, an LLM flagging first what a child should not hear, and holds the play settings, the roles and the fallback networks.

ReactPythonFastAPIRaspberry PiWeb AudioDocker
The installation

What I work with

Frontend

React10 yrsTypeScript5 yrsSass11 yrsRedux5 yrsAngular1 yrIonic1 yrjQuery3 yrs

Backend

Python10 yrsDjango10 yrsTemporal<1 yrPHP4 yrsLaravel1 yrC#2 yrsExpress<1 yr

Databases

PostgreSQL10 yrsRedis4 yrsInfluxDB4 yrsmySQL3 yrsMSSQL2 yrs

DevOps & Tooling

Docker10 yrsGitHub9 yrsGitHub Actions5 yrsAWS5 yrsCypress5 yrsGitLab5 yrsPortainer1 yrSubversion2 yrs

Languages

ItalianEnglish

Soft skills

PragmaticDetail-orientedPersistent

What people say

Consorzio Balsamico
Consorzio BalsamicoCollettivo teatrale · Reggio Emilia

It was a true privilege to collaborate with Francesco Meli on the software development for Il giardino delle cose sperse (The Garden of Lost Things), an interactive installation and performance produced by Consorzio Balsamico and premiered at the Segnali Festival in Milan.

Il giardino delle cose sperse explores the relationship between memory and matter, presence and absence. To bring this vision to life, we needed an interactive digital space: a "radio of memories" accessible both via web and during live performances, designed to collect, broadcast, and record personal stories and intimate anecdotes.

Francesco took our initial core idea and helped us refine, elaborate, and fully realize it. He crafted a software solution that seamlessly handles both headphone listening (at a dedicated station where visitors can also record new memories) and ambient sound diffusion throughout the room, creating an immersive atmosphere.

What truly sets Francesco apart is his meticulous attention to detail and his ability to integrate technology naturally into an artistic process. His technical mastery and creative insight greatly enriched our installation.

I highly recommend Francesco Meli to anyone looking for a software developer who combines top-tier technical expertise with vision, precision, and artistic sensitivity.

Rick Faucher
Rick FaucherChief Partnerships Officer

Francesco was exceptional in tackling a big project in a small amount of time for us. He was efficient and very knowledgeable in connecting a new website front-end through middleware to the backend API engine. His troubleshooting and QA skills were put to task and he rose to the challenge with ease. I wouldn't hesitate to add him to another project or a dev team in the future.

Ian Baker
Ian BakerFullstack Software Engineer

I can enthusiastically recommend Francesco as a Software Engineer! I had the pleasure of collaborating with him at The Connected Pet Company, where his expertise with front end technologies like React proved invaluable, allowing us to iterate quickly and meet a tight deadline. Francesco consistently delivers high-quality solutions and demonstrates a strong ability to juggle business, product, and technological challenges. His professionalism and dedication make him a valuable asset to any team.

Stefano Bertelli
Stefano BertelliEngineering Manager

Francesco is a very talented engineer, always eager to challenge himself with new tasks. His analytical approach is remarkable. When dealing with new problems he has an open minded approach and it's not afraid of exploring new technologies to find leading edge solutions. He is a passionate developer with great communication skills and impressive dedication!

Tom KotsakosBusiness Analyst

Francesco worked tirelessly on developing the back-end and front-end for our company website from scratch. He has a very analytical mind, learns quickly and thoroughly, and has a broad knowledge on tangential fields to our business which offered a perspective that helped us give input on the design.

Let's work together

Open in MapsReggio Emilia, Italy
Message on WhatsApp+39 340 238 0765
Send an emailiamfrancescomeli@gmail.com

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