Danilo Leocata

Danilo Leocata

IT Consultant · Backend & Data Science Engineer

About Me

Software Engineer with 6+ years of experience designing and scaling robust backend architectures for fintech, gaming, and enterprise clients. Hold an M.Sc. in Data Science (110/110, University of Catania) with a peer-reviewed publication in reinforcement learning (ICAART 2025) and hands-on expertise in PyTorch-based deep learning. Currently driving legacy modernization and microservices migration initiatives in fintech, while actively collaborating on projects that integrate machine learning and AI agents into software systems, continuously expanding expertise in advanced data-driven applications.

Work Experience

IT Consultant

Reply Technology Financial Services · Milano
Mar 2024 – Present

Fintech Consultant for major banking clients, delivering end-to-end solutions across back-office, and customer-facing platforms from initial requirements and architecture to final production release. Collaborate on the modernization of the bank's core sales platform — which processes 250,000--300,000 daily transactions — helping boost system performance by 50% during a full-scale migration to AWS. Optimize system reliability through rigorous load testing and monitoring, while managing release pipelines, deployment workflows, and enablement ticketing. By integrating AI agents into daily development workflows, cut delivery time by 30% and accelerate bug detection by 40%, strategic time savings reinvested into anticipating future development needs, mastering new frameworks, and pursuing technical certifications.

  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Maven
  • Oracle DB
  • Kibana
  • RedHat
  • JPA
  • JDBC

Backend Developer

Mongibello Tech · Catania
Jul 2022 – Mar 2024

Owned and maintained microservices for game management across national and international gaming platforms operating in 3 markets, processing over 10,000 daily transactions. Delivering end-to-end solutions across multiple concurrent projects, coordinating with cross-country teams to consistently hit tight release deadlines while cutting the defect rate by 50%.

  • Spring Boot
  • Gradle
  • Java
  • Groovy
  • MySQL
  • Bash

FullStack Developer

Synapses · Catania
Sep 2021 – Jul 2022

Bug fixing and feature development on the proprietary product; built an internal estimation tool from scratch.

  • Flutter
  • Java Spring Boot
  • Maven
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

FullStack Developer

Bizmate · Catania
Dec 2019 – Jun 2021

Developed multiple products from scratch: restaurant reservation web-app, License Manager, and Account Manager. Started with front-end maintenance, then took full ownership of new builds.

  • Svelte
  • NodeJS
  • Docker
  • MongoDB
  • Keycloak
  • Redis
  • Bootstrap

Selected Projects

Full list on GitHub.

CrowdSim Real 2023

Deep RL simulator for LiDAR-based robot navigation in complex, crowded environments.

Python PyTorch Deep RL

Microservices-based online football betting platform following distributed systems best practices.

Java Spring Boot

Monolith-to-microservices migration with CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Keycloak auth, and AWS deploy.

Java Kubernetes AWS

Triplet Neural Network for image classification using PyTorch Lightning.

Python PyTorch

Skills & Tools

Major Skills

  • Java
  • Python
  • Spring Boot
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB

Currently Flashing

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • CI/CD Pipeline (Github)

Frontend & Other (Amateur)

  • Node.js
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Svelte
  • Flutter
  • Bootstrap

Tools & Platforms

  • Git
  • Kibana
  • RedHat
  • Keycloak
  • AWS

Education

  • M.Sc. — Data Science
    University of Catania, Italy
    Oct 2020 – Dec 2023
    Graduated 110/110 · Specialized in machine learning and data science, complemented by coursework in DevOps methodologies and software engineering.
  • Erasmus+
    Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria
    Sep 2018 – Jun 2019
    All exams passed with full marks in English
  • B.Sc. — Computer Science
    University of Catania, Italy
    Oct 2015 – Sep 2019
    Graduated 100/110

Certifications

Publications

Language

  • Italian (Native)
  • English (Proficient · CEFR C2 goFluent)
  • Spanish (Amateur)

Currently Pursuing