Alessandro Puccetti

My name is Alessandro Puccetti, I am Italian 🇮🇹 but I am in fact a citizen of the world 🌎. I love travelling and meeting new people from different cultures, and I enjoy having a particular focus on their food 😉.

What am I up to now?

I am a data platform engineer with a passion for automation. One of my personal motto is “If you have to do it more than three times you’ve gotta automate it”. I currently work at Huq Industries (from 2017) in London as Principal Data Platform Engineer, where I design and build our infrastructure to manage and process hundreds of billions of geospatial events. I am a Google Cloud Platform technologies specialist, notably of BigQuery. At Huq Industries, I built our internal and client-facing data platforms using BigQuery as foundation to allow us and our clients to perform geospatial analytics on billions of events at lighting speed. Also, I lead the Huq scraping effort to collect data used in our enrichment data pipelines. After working hours, I like writing blogposts and giving specialized talks about cool things I do at work and about personal side projects. You can find my blogposts on this website and on my Medium page. You can also find me giving talks at the GDG Cloud London.

Past Experiences

Since middle school, I have always been fascinated by computers and programming. During those years, I had my first programming experience. I still remember starting programming in BASIC at my old school laboratory. Very “basic” stuff (pun intended) 😆. Lots of time has passed from that day. In high school, I learned more about programming and computer science and I have eventually decided to follow my passion at university, first earning my bachelor degree and then my master’s in computer engineering. For my master thesis project, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the University of California San Diego (UCSD) working at the Center for Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) for 6 months. There I worked on IP spoofing detection algorithms.

After my graduation, I did a 6 months research internship research at the SECLAB at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). There, I worked on security and privacy in mobile applications. One of the projects I was part of at the SecLab was then presented at the 2017 SECLAB (NDSS) Symposium under the title “Obfuscation-Resilient Privacy Leak Detection for Mobile Apps Through Differential Analysis”. I have also worked as reverse and vulnerability analyst on a challenge for DARPA. During the time spent at SecLab I joined Shellphish, its capture the flag team. As a team member, I contributed to organizing and running the 2015 International Capture The Flag (iCTF) competition and participated at DEFCON23 capture the flag event.

My following research experience has been at the Internet Initiative Japan - Innovation Institute(IIJ-II) (IIJ-II) in Tokyo, Japan. There I worked on a project to securely monitor path quality. I developed a tool to perform lightweight traffic summaries with the goal of detecting SLA violations such as packet delay and packet drop, as well as packet alteration. I have also participated as a volunteer at the 2015 Internet Measurements Conference (IMC).

In 2016, I joined Kinvolk in Berlin working as a software developer on different open source projects such as rkt and systemd.