AI Engineer | Building a Platform to Deploy & Operate AI Agents at Scale
Caserta, Italy · LinkedIn · paovalletta@hotmail.it
Curiosity has always been my compass. Technology is not a job I picked — it is something I have been doing since I was a kid, pushing myself to build my own projects: proofs of concept, experiments, small tools for problems I had. Most of them were useless. All of them taught me something, and none of them were homework.
I never waited for a course to teach me. Straight out of high school I started writing web software for real clients: two management systems — one in pharmaceutical manufacturing and medical sales rep management, one for surgical practices — in PHP, HTML, JS and CSS, which at the beginning I barely knew. I learned by breaking them and fixing them, on the job, and they are still in production today. When AI-assisted coding arrived, I finally had the chance to restructure and refactor them into something I would write today.
At university I built OrariUnina: it collected the lecture timetable of every course and degree programme and derived which classrooms were free at any given time, so students could find a place to study.
I think like a product owner before I think like an engineer: first the person using it and the problem, then the feature, then the code. Today my focus is LLMs, RAG architectures and agentic AI in enterprise systems, and in the last year I have followed the field without pause — models, releases, benchmarks, evaluation practices, and the people worth following.
| Period | Company | Role | Work |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 – now | Exelab | AI Engineer | Design and delivery of AI-powered products, with a strong focus on autonomous development workflows and intelligent systems. I lead a 3-person team: R&D roadmap, technical direction and engineering standards. |
| 2024 – 2025 | Gematica | AI Technical Team Leader | Created and led the company's AI engineering team. Architected secure enterprise GenAI platforms for confidential documents: LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector search, agent-based workflows. |
| 2018 – 2024 | Gematica | Software Engineer | High-availability railway platforms (Hitachi Rail, 40+ heterogeneous devices, thousands of events per minute), ICCS for Honolulu public transit, CI/CD backends for IBM. |
| 2018 | Gematica | Intern | Big Data analytics platform for predictive maintenance in the railway sector. |
| 2013 – 2015 | Self-employed | Web Developer | The two management systems above, plus web applications for third-party clients. My first real school: PHP, jQuery, HTML, JS, MySQL. |
University of Naples Federico II — MSc in Computer Engineering, 110/110 cum laude (2016–2018) · BSc in Computer Engineering, 110/110 (2013–2016)