Mar 2025 – Oct 2025 · 7 mos

• At Pinecone, I drive research at the intersection of Information Retrieval and Vector Databases—publishing at top venues (SIGIR, ECIR), collaborating with product and engineering to bring cutting-edge retrieval models into production, and mentoring the next generation of researchers. My work spans sparse and hybrid retrieval, reranking, ANN algorithms, and generative applications, with a focus on bridging academic innovation and real-world impact.

Oct 2023 – Mar 2025 · 1 yr 5 mos

Mar 2022 – Oct 2023 · 1 yr 7 mos · Remote

• At Amazon Alexa AI (now AGI), I built—together with my team—a billion-scale web search engine to ground Alexa’s answers, now powering LLMs. I productionized a retrieval engine inspired by my PhD project PISA (https://github.com/pisa-engine/pisa), deployed deep learning models and large-scale retrieval algorithms, and introduced techniques to make search efficient at massive scale. I also mentored interns and worked cross-functionally to deliver production-ready AI systems with real-world impact.

Sep 2021 – Mar 2022 · 6 mos · Remote

Jun 2019 – Aug 2019 · 2 mos · Barcelona Area, Spain

• I work in Search

Jan 2018 – Jan 2022 · 4 yrs · New York City Metropolitan Area

• Teaching Assistant for:
• CS 6913: Web Search Engines (Fall 2018)

Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 · 2 yrs · London Area, United Kingdom

• Working in the Collaboration Frameworks team on a distributed architecture, and ensuring reliability, scalability and performance. Working in an Agile team, doing software development/testing, code optimization and code review. Learned how to work with large volumes of real-time data, and how to develop software in a large-scale, fast-paced environment.
• Detailed achievements:
• Involved in the design and development of a tagging and sharing framwork.
• Designed and refactored code following the microservice paradigm.
• Created a Continuous Integration infrastructure to automate build, tests and deployment.
• Migrated the build system to use the more modern CMake.
• Introduced static code analysis and code coverage to run on the codebase.
• Investigated and debugged production environment issues caused by software defects, system configuration errors, and data inconsistencies.

Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 · 3 yrs · Pisa, Tuscany, Italy

• Worked for the Italian National Research Council on projects for the ccTLD .it Registry.
• Detailed achievements:
• Developed several features of the main application (RAIN-NG) used by NIC .it domain name
• registrars. Focused on database query optimization, export of data, third-party web-services
• integration.
• Cooperation to the development of an internal application (jBilling), used by administrative staff
• to manage contracts and billing system. Focused on UX enhancement, data presentation and
• export.
• Cooperated to the development of an ETL system and presentation of data using interactive
• charts.
• Developed a UI library for JavaServer Faces (JSF) application and integration with the main NIC
• applications.
• Planned and developed an e-voting system (Endorse-Me) used for the election of the steering
• committee.

Jan 2011 – Jan 2016 · 5 yrs · Agrigento, Sicily, Italy

• Detailed achievements:
• Planned and developed a web application providing web privacy and anonymity tools: user
• management, load balancing, payment integration (Paypal, Bitcoin, credit card gateway, phone). Design of a RESTful API for third-party integration.
• Mail server configuration and administration.
• Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox extension development to integrate features of a web application.
• Planned and developed of a CMS to perform feed aggregation using parsing technics and categorisation.
• Software prototyping of a crawling and parsing system of an airline company to extract flight
• information and post-analysis.
• Developed of an ad-hoc download manager software, including packaging for Windows and OS X.
• Owned an Italian blog network about technology circulated throughout and realised using Wordpress. Development of several plugins, integration with advertising agency web services. System administration main focused on performance optimization.