Hello, I’m Italo Vietro

I'm Head of Engineering at Parloa, where we're figuring out how to make AI conversations actually work reliably at scale. The kind of problem where "move fast and break things" doesn't fly. I've been in tech for 18+ years. Started fixing computers in João Pessoa, Brazil, eventually moved into software, and made my way across Europe building teams and systems.

What I’ve learned about people

At N26, I led 40 engineers across core banking and pushed hard for squad ownership: “you build it, you run it, you own it.” Easy to say, hard to make real. It only works when people actually feel safe owning their failures, not just their successes.

At HelloFresh, as the team grew fast, a lot of people joined who hadn’t been there when the culture was forming. The ones who grew the most weren’t the ones with the best technical skills. They were the ones who asked good questions, gave honest feedback, and weren’t afraid to say “I don’t know.” Helping engineers like that grow into leads taught me more about leadership than any book.

I keep coming back to the idea that the best engineering cultures are built on trust, not process. Process helps, but without trust it’s just paperwork.

What I’ve learned about teams

At HelloFresh, I was part of the journey from 13 engineers to 300+ as Director of Engineering. We replaced a monolithic PHP codebase with cloud-native Go services. The technical migration was the straightforward part. The real challenge was growing without getting slower. Adding people doesn’t make you faster. Making people effective does.

At Urban Sports Club, I helped build a TechHub in Spain. No playbook, no prior team, just a mandate to ship faster. What worked wasn’t working harder. It was replacing ad-hoc heroics with shared goals and compounding, predictable progress.

At Lykon, I went from Head of Technology to CTO and grew an engineering team from scratch in a highly regulated health sector. Building a 40+ microservice platform while navigating investor expectations and healthcare compliance taught me that innovation and regulation aren’t opposites. You just have to be more intentional about both.

What I’ve learned about systems

My systems thinking started in Brazil, building high-load systems that handled company registration for the Brazilian government. When millions of businesses depend on your platform to incorporate, you learn about event-driven architecture and scalability the hard way. That shaped how I think about reliability and design to this day.

Your org chart is your architecture. That’s Conway’s Law, and I’ve seen it play out everywhere. No amount of design documents will overcome a team structure that pulls in the wrong direction.

At Babbel as VP of Platform, I led 120+ people across Core Platform, Infrastructure, Reliability, and Enterprise Ops. Reading Team Topologies gave me the language, but the real lesson came from seeing it play out: platform teams fail when they operate as a service desk and succeed when they enable product teams to be autonomous. We pushed FinOps so teams owned their own cloud costs and introduced Shift-Left Testing to catch problems before they reached production.

Beyond the Code

When I’m not thinking about distributed systems, you’ll find me managing my homelab (Kubernetes clusters, self-hosted everything), brewing coffee with an amount of precision that my family finds unreasonable, strategizing over D&D campaigns, and being a dedicated dad and husband. The homelab is where I experiment. The coffee is where I focus. The D&D is where I accept that even the best-laid plans fall apart.