Francesco Farina
Tech Lead, Recommendation Systems
Summary
Hands-on technical lead and backend/platform engineer with 9+ years of experience building scalable Go services and distributed systems. Leading Sliide’s Recommendation Systems team, with a focus on ML pipelines, vector search, retrieval and ranking for products serving millions of devices.
Experience
Sliide
09/2026 - Present
Tech Lead, Recommendation Systems
Leading Sliide’s newly formed Recommendation Systems team, owning the technical direction and delivery of systems that personalise content for millions of devices.
- Owning the technical strategy and architecture for content recommendation, retrieval and ranking
- Leading delivery across ML pipelines, vector search and Go services, from experimentation through production
- Evolving platform capabilities into reliable recommendation products serving millions of devices
- Establishing engineering practices that support experimentation, operational reliability and sustainable delivery
Sliide
08/2025 - 09/2026
Senior Platform Engineer
Built the Go services and data pipelines powering content discovery, ranking and recommendations for millions of devices.
- Drove R&D projects from prototype to production, turning experiments into platform capabilities
- Built and operated ML pipelines feeding content ranking and recommendation systems
- Designed and integrated a vector store powering semantic search and similarity-based retrieval
- Developed ranking algorithms to personalise the content served to millions of devices
Sliide
04/2022 - 07/2025
Senior Software Engineer
Building Go microservices at scale on Kubernetes to serve thousands requests per second.
- Member of the Platform team: building and maintaining services focusing on content (news, videos and ads) ingestion and serving to millions of devices
- Building a notification system to send millions of push notifications per day using AWS SNS and FCM
River Island
01/2021 - 03/2022
Technical Lead
Leading a new backend team in building a scalable customer backbone with the team by: driving the product architecture, promoting collaboration and engagement, integrating other internal systems and third parties, assuring code quality, controlling technical debt, ensuring healthy code reviews and safe releases.
- Designing a complete serverless solution leveraging AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis and SQS
River Island
05/2018 - 12/2020
Microservices Engineer
Building Go microservices at scale, contributing to building payments and orders services.
- Building and scaling services covering orders lifecycle focusing on the payments processes: integrating payment providers and building payment flows using an event-driven architecture
- Leveraging AWS technologies such as AWS Lambda, ECS, RDS, SQS and Kinesis to build a scalable serverless solution
- Using Go, Docker, Concourse and Jenkins
ServiceNow
04/2017 - 04/2018
Technical Support Engineer
Providing technical support to ServiceNow customers for platform integration specific issues (emails, SSO, data exports). Developing tools in Go.
- ServiceNow integrations: emails, SSO, SAML, data exports.
ServiceNow
10/2016 - 03/2017
Internship
Developing scheduling applications for ServiceNow Training team.
- Learning ITIL while leveraging the ServiceNow platform to build professional solutions.
Education
Università degli Studi di Salerno
10/2013 - 10/2016
Master's Degree Computer Science
network science
distributed systems
advanced algorithms
Università degli Studi di Salerno
09/2010 - 09/2013
Bachelor's Degree Computer Science
object oriented programming
computer networks
operative systems
computational theory