About
Engineer first, manager second, still both.
I'm Vale. I run the website team at Photoroom, and I'm still hands-on. The roadmap, the hiring and the 1:1s are my job. So is the code.
Three beams, each fine on its own. Together, impossible. Teams can be like that.
How I think
The longer version
- Parma
- Leeds
- Boston
- New York
- Atlanta
- Mendrisio
- Paris
I grew up in Italy and studied computer science in Parma, with a year in Leeds and a semester at Boston College along the way. The master’s at Georgia Tech came later, in Human-Computer Interaction, mostly because I wanted to know why some interfaces feel obvious and others feel like homework.
The work I like most sits where product, design and engineering overlap. An onboarding flow that quietly doubles activation. A batch editor that handles hundreds of images without making you think about it. An AI feature that shows you the result before it costs you anything. These days a good chunk of my week goes into working with coding agents, and into figuring out which parts of the craft they change and which parts they don’t.
I care about the details most people never consciously notice: timing, spacing, how a component breathes on hover, whether a screen reader gets the same story as a sighted user. That kind of attention and shipping fast are not opposites. They just need a team that wants both.
Outside work: drums, guitar, bubble tea, and a skateboard I am slowly getting better on.
Terminal version:
Experience
Where I have worked
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Photoroom · Engineering Manager, Website
April 2026 to present · Paris, hybrid
Running engineering for photoroom.com: the roadmap, the architecture, the team, and still some of the code.
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- Lead photoroom.com engineering: technical roadmap, architecture, quality, and acquisition goals.
- Manage the website team: 1:1s, feedback, performance, and career growth.
- Drive delivery across marketing, search, brand, product, and growth stakeholders.
- Stay hands-on in React and TypeScript on growth and monetisation initiatives.
React · Next.js · TypeScript · MobX · Tailwind CSS · Playwright · Amplitude
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Photoroom · Senior Front-End Engineer
April 2025 to April 2026 · Paris, hybrid
Onboarding, the batch editor, in-browser AVIF export, and AI previews.
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- Rebuilt the web onboarding flow in MobX, lifting activation from 50% to 95% and enabling rapid A/B testing across login, onboarding, and paywall.
- Owned Photoroom’s batch editor end to end, rebuilding core editing and selection workflows for processing hundreds of images at once, with per-section ZIP export, bulk multi-select actions, and tile reordering.
- Built in-browser AVIF export: a client-side AV1 encoder and AVIF container that preserves transparency while exporting transparent cutouts as smaller files than equivalent PNGs.
- Built AI Shadows, a credit-aware preview that lets users judge generated results before spending credits, integrating the ML team’s pipelines into the editor.
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Remote.com · Front-End Software Engineer
April 2022 to March 2025 · Remote, Italy
AI-powered compliance features, and the design system that held the product together.
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- Shipped AI-powered offboarding-compliance features into production by integrating LangChain and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into user-facing workflows.
- Built and maintained design-system components in React and Styled Components, improving UI consistency, accessibility, and developer velocity across the product.
- Led the migration of design-system documentation from Storybook to Zeroheight, creating a single source of truth for designers and engineers.
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CloudAcademy · Front-End Software Engineer
May 2020 to March 2022 · Mendrisio, Switzerland
Onboarding, learning features, and reusable components for an e-learning platform.
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- Revamped the onboarding and first-run experience, boosting user retention by 20%.
- Delivered features in React, GraphQL, and Styled Components, backed by unit (React Testing Library) and end-to-end (Cypress) tests.
- Contributed reusable design-system components (Storybook, TypeScript, React).
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Mailchimp · UX Engineer Intern
May to August 2019 · Atlanta, GA, USA
A summer on the Design System team in Atlanta, helping standardise UI patterns across the product.
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- Selected from over 5,000 applicants to join Mailchimp’s Design System team and help standardize UI patterns across the platform.
- Implemented the UI for Mailchimp’s Design Principles page, used to standardize design practices across departments.
- Contributed to internal tooling with new components built in React, Storybook, and LESS.
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Adobe · Front-End Engineer Intern
June to September 2018 · New York, NY, USA
A summer on Behance in New York: a Vue.js stories feature and the main navigation’s accessibility.
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- Collaborated on Behance’s stories feature in Vue.js, with integration and unit tests in Jasmine.
- Improved accessibility and keyboard navigation for Behance’s main navigation menu.
Education
Where I studied
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Georgia Institute of Technology
M.S. in Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction specialization
2021 to 2023 · Atlanta, GA, USA
- GPA 4.0
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Università degli Studi di Parma
B.S. in Computer Science
2016 to 2019 · Parma, Italy
- Erasmus year at the University of Leeds, UK
- Exchange semester at Boston College, MA, USA
Toolbox
What I work with
- Working with agents
- Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Orca, Grok Bot, Agent skills and prompt design
- AI in the product
- AI-powered editing experiences, Generative features in production, Agentic workflows, LangChain and RAG
- Front-end
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, MobX, GraphQL, Tailwind CSS, Radix UI, Astro
- Quality and testing
- Playwright, Cypress, Jest, React Testing Library, Accessibility
- Design
- Figma, Design systems, Storybook, Zeroheight
- Leading
- Technical roadmaps, Hiring and 1:1s, A/B experimentation (Amplitude), Cross-functional delivery
- Languages
- TypeScript, JavaScript, Python
Elsewhere: GitHub · LinkedIn · X · dev.to · Medium · Instagram