Luca Palonca

About

I’m a software engineer with 7+ years of experience, currently a Backend Tech Lead building AI-heavy healthcare SaaS infrastructure for a US company, remotely from Italy.

My work splits into two halves that are usually sold separately but rarely built separately: the backend engineering — APIs, data models, migrations, infrastructure — and the production AI systems that sit on top of it, like real-time conversational agents, guardrails, evals and structured outputs. The backend half is the older one and still the larger one; the AI half is what the last few years have mostly been about. I co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on anomaly detection in time series (Springer, Knowledge and Information Systems, 2020) during my Master’s at the University of Milan-Bicocca.

How I work

I’m based in Italy, with hours that overlap the US workday. Engagements through /work/ are written first — reports and pull requests, with calls where they help and no standing meetings. I take one at a time, alongside my main role.

Experience

  1. 02/2024 - Present
    Backend Tech Lead
    Barti · San Francisco, CA (Remote)
    • Python
    • Kubernetes
    • GCP
  2. 11/2022 - 02/2024
    Software Engineer
    Cedar · New York City, NY (Remote)
    • Python
    • JavaScript
    • Kubernetes
    • GCP
  3. 03/2020 - 11/2022
    Backend Engineer
    Sailogy · Chiasso, Switzerland
    • Python
    • Redis
    • PostgreSQL
    • Docker
  4. 11/2019 - 03/2020
    Research Fellowship (SWE)
    • Python
    • Elasticsearch
  5. 01/2019 - 03/2020
    ETL Engineer
    • Python
    • Oracle DB
    • SQL
  6. 10/2017 - 07/2019
    Master's Degree in Computer Science
Download full résumé (PDF) →

Personal projects