I'm Pietro Zuco. Technical Director at Commodore.
I build systems and I make them work together. Backends and APIs, cloud and on-premises infrastructure, mobile apps, and the migrations and integrations that connect one to another. Twenty-five years of it, across four countries and most of the stack.
The constant has been joining things up. UNIX estates onto Linux. Legacy platforms onto Kubernetes. Third-party APIs into catalogues that weren’t expecting them. Lately, AI models into organisations that already had a way of working. The technology on either side keeps changing. The problem in the middle stays recognisable.
What I work on
Systems and infrastructure. Backend services and APIs in Go and Python. Cloud platforms on GCP and AWS, and increasingly on hardware that clients own outright. Terraform, Kubernetes, CI pipelines, and the security and cost decisions that come with them.
Integration and migration. Getting a new system to coexist with the twelve that came before it, moving a platform without stopping the business, and making the seams invisible to the people using it.
AI where it earns its place. Recent years have leaned this way, because it’s what organisations need integration help with right now. I build models into existing pipelines rather than alongside them, keep the data under the client’s control, and deploy at whatever security tier the work genuinely requires, up to and including fully disconnected. I’m equally willing to say when a model isn’t the answer.
Teams. Mentoring engineers, setting practice, and doing the technical direction that keeps a small organisation from accumulating decisions nobody remembers making.
Bio
I learned to program on a Commodore 64. Four decades later I’m Technical Director at Commodore, which is either a very long game or a coincidence I’ve decided to enjoy.
The role covers systems architecture and software leadership: backend and API design, platform and DevOps, security across the company, and evaluating what to build, what to buy and what to leave alone. I also lead how we adopt AI internally. A fair amount of it doesn’t fit neatly under a job title.
Before this: twenty-five years of Linux, open-source infrastructure and software engineering. I’ve been a system administrator, an open-source community leader, an iOS developer, and a lead engineer in Python and DevOps. Along the way, HP Japan, KDDI, AXA Direct Japan, VML London, INSHUR, MPB and White Space. Ten of those years were in Japan, which is where I learned most of what I know about working with multicultural teams.
I still write code, mostly Go and Python, with C and C++ when something needs to be close to the metal. High-volume microservices, fault-tolerant infrastructure, retrieval architectures, container orchestration, infrastructure as code.
Areas of expertise
- Languages: Go, Python, C/C++, Swift, Bash, JavaScript, Rego. Java, PHP and Perl when history requires it.
- Back-end: API and service architecture, FastAPI, Django, Flask, SQLAlchemy, gRPC
- DevOps & cloud: Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Vault, GCP, AWS, GitLab CI/CD
- Systems: Linux (Debian, RedHat, HP-UX), macOS, Solaris, AIX
- iOS: Swift, Objective-C, MVVM, Cocoa Touch, Xcode, Fastlane
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle
- AI & LLMs: OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, RAG, Whisper, self-hosted models via Ollama, MCP
- Practice: Agile (Scrum/Kanban), TDD, BDD, SRE, security and cost review
Selected work
- Technical direction at Commodore: architecture, platform, security and internal AI adoption.
- Migrated legacy infrastructure at INSHUR from AWS Lambda to GCP Cloud Functions, and EC2 to GKE, with the automation to make it repeatable.
- Led AI and DevOps delivery at White Space for UK government and commercial clients, including self-hosted LLM platforms in air-gapped environments on local Kubernetes.
- Architected and shipped the iOS app that professional drivers used to buy insurance, including a variant that ran on physical stands at events.
- Lead engineer at MPB through a GDPR-driven market expansion: new languages, database migrations, Solr search.
- Built an OPA policy control system for Kubernetes and Terraform compliance in CI/CD.
- Built the official iOS apps for Premiership Rugby and DEVO, and a DICOM viewer for radiological imaging.
- Mentored engineers from juniors to ops leads.
Away from the keyboard
Photography and retro computing, and two YouTube channels that reflect it: photography and vintage computer hardware. The second one has become suspiciously relevant to the day job :)
Get in touch
Open to consulting engagements, contract work and conversations that haven’t got a shape yet.
[email protected] · London, UK