Simone Popolizio

I step in when technology meets complexity: when your systems need scaling, your teams need restructuring, or when hidden problems threaten to derail everything. I see what others miss: the technical debt that's actually a people problem, the architecture that won't survive your growth, the team dynamics that kill velocity.

What I bring: 13 years evolving from developer to CTO across diverse contexts, from TicketOne's 1M+ concurrent users to AI startups, from FinTech compliance to platform rebuilds. Built and scaled teams from 2 to 50 people. Survived 2 startup failures, led through acquisitions, shipped products that still run today. My edge? Pattern recognition across both systems and humans.

Technical foundation: Architected high-performance systems handling 50K+ ML predictions/day. Achieved 40% cloud cost reductions. Built PCI-DSS compliant infrastructures. But I know that perfect code means nothing if the organization can't ship it.

How I work:

- Technical audits with truth: Architecture reviews that reveal both code debt and organizational blockers

- Crisis interventions: When production is burning or teams are imploding (often both)

- Transformation sprints: From "this can't scale" to "this runs itself" in weeks, not months

- Strategic consulting: Making technical decisions that align with business reality

- Team assessments: Identifying why velocity dropped and what actually fixes it