Valerio Cofano - Senior Backend Engineer & Tech Lead

Valerio Cofano

I help scale-ups ship faster — without breaking things.

Backend architecture, distributed systems & AI integration. Available for senior engineering retainers.

About Me

Your team is growing but your system isn't keeping up. Latency is climbing, deploys feel risky, and your engineers spend more time firefighting than building.

I embed with scaling engineering teams as a hands-on senior engineer — not a contractor waiting for tickets. Over 15+ years I've designed high-concurrency services, async event pipelines, and cloud-native architectures for regulated, high-traffic platforms across Switzerland and internationally.

Whether you need to untangle a monolith, harden a critical service, or set technical direction for your next growth phase — I bring the architectural depth and hands-on delivery your team needs to ship with confidence.

Experience

15+ years in software development, system architecture, and team leadership.

Track Record

  • Regulated environments (compliance, auditability)
  • SaaS and high-traffic platforms
  • Switzerland and international teams

Results

Real outcomes from real systems.

High-Concurrency Booking Service

Situation. A global digital marketplace needed a new revenue product allocating scarce promotion slots under auction-like contention, with millions of users.
Action. Designed a dedicated booking microservice with idempotency, retry, race-condition protection, and deterministic allocation. Coordinated backend, frontend, QA, product, and design.
Result. Shipped the company's most ambitious revenue initiative on schedule.

10× Throughput

Situation. High-traffic review platform (~1,700 concurrent users) hitting performance ceiling during rapid growth.
Action. Refactored backend architecture and caching strategy; validated improvements via simulation and load testing.
Result. Platform scaled to handle 10× the previous workload.

Kafka Event Pipelines

Situation. Millions of users generating high-throughput events in a regulated environment; synchronous processing couldn't keep up.
Action. Architected async event pipelines using Kafka, webhooks, and background workers, decoupling external providers from the core platform.
Result. Reliable high-throughput async processing with improved observability.

How I Work

How I engage

I work best embedded in your team on an ongoing retainer — understanding your system deeply and contributing continuously. I'm also open to well-scoped engagements like architecture audits, performance investigations, or critical feature delivery when the problem and timeline are clear. Either way, I work async-first in CET, on a cadence that fits your team.

What's included

  • Architecture reviews and technical direction
  • Hands-on development
  • Async communication and written reports
  • No daily standups — we align on a cadence that fits your team

What I don't do

  • Full-time availability — I typically work with 1–2 clients at a time
  • Vague, open-ended engagements without clear goals

Ideal client

CTO or VP Engineering at a 20–150 person company with a tech-heavy product and scaling challenges. You need an experienced engineer who can contribute to architecture decisions and ship alongside your team.

What I Bring to Your Stack

The tools and practices behind reliable, scalable systems

💻 Languages

PythonGoPHPJavaScriptTypeScript

⚙️ Frameworks

DjangoFastAPILaravelReactVue.js

💾 Databases

PostgreSQLMongoDBMySQLRedisMariaDB

🔄 Async & Messaging

KafkaWebhooksBackground Workers

☁️ Cloud & DevOps

DockerCI/CD PipelinesAWSGoogle Cloud

📊 Observability & Tooling

GitHubGitLabSentryNew Relic

Core Competencies

System Design & Software Architecture
Distributed & Event-Driven Systems
Backend Engineering
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
High-Concurrency Systems
CI/CD & DevOps Practices
Cross-functional Collaboration

Experience

15+ years of professional engineering — resume and full career path below