Italo Vietro
Conference Talks
From cost to impact: Hands-on strategies for cost management optimization
A more hands-on version of the infrastructure investment talk. SLOs, KPI Trees, and FinOps culture in practice. Less about convincing the business and more about giving engineers the tools to own their costs without it feeling like a chore.
From cost to impact: Leading through infrastructure investment decisions
As an engineering leader, I kept having the same uncomfortable conversation: justify this infrastructure spend to the business. I got tired of losing those arguments because I was speaking the wrong language. This talk is about reframing infrastructure investment as business impact, not cost center. It took me years of mistakes to get the framing right.
Panel: Assessing key tech leadership topics
A panel discussion at Spielfeld Digital Hub on how engineering leaders evaluate critical decisions. I was VP of Platform at Babbel at the time. We covered AI adoption, scaling engineering orgs, and the gap between what leadership books tell you and what actually happens when you’re in the room making the call.
Designing for failure
I learned about failure the hard way. Building high-load systems for the Brazilian government, scaling HelloFresh from monolith to microservices, running core banking at N26. When your system can’t go down, “it should be fine” is not an architecture decision. This talk covers the patterns I wish I’d known earlier: circuit breakers, bulkheads, and how SRE principles translate to real production systems.
Podcast Appearances
Why You Shouldn't Encourage Heroism In Your Team
A written interview that turned into one of the most honest conversations I’ve had publicly. We got into why heroism in engineering teams is a symptom of broken systems, not something to celebrate. If someone is always saving the day, something is fundamentally wrong with how work is structured.
Building an Elite Engineering Culture
The host pushed me on what “elite” actually means in practice, and I appreciated that. We got into psychological safety, how high-performing teams actually form (not through hiring, mostly), and why the culture you have at 20 engineers doesn’t survive to 200 without intentional work.
The Critical Channel
The Critical Channel
Me and three co-hosts started this podcast because there was a conversation we kept wanting to have that didn’t exist anywhere else. The messy reality of engineering leadership. What happens between the LinkedIn posts. We talk about culture, hard decisions, organizational dysfunction, and the stuff that’s hard to say out loud at work.