Diagnoses at the component, not the ticket
Thermal bench-testing, firmware and BIOS flashing, soldering and harness wiring. When a node fails I find the part, not the symptom.
Monte Carasso, Ticino. Six years at the bench, five years on Linux, four servers in production. Looking for datacenter operations, hardware integration or Linux systems support, on-site or hybrid.
PietroQuintavalle
I build infrastructure from the solder joint up. Component-level diagnostics, ZFS storage, zero-trust networks, and the occasional driver written from a packet dump.
0years assembling and repairing hardware
0systems built for private clients
0active users on self-hosted infrastructure
0minutes to rebuild a cluster from bare metal
Scroll. The particles follow.
What you get when you hire me
Treats every host as disposable
Ansible playbooks and Docker Compose rebuild the whole environment from a blank disk in under thirty minutes. Nothing important lives only in one place.
Zero exposed WAN ports, by default
Cloudflare Tunnels, WireGuard and Tailscale meshes, SSO with 2FA, host firewalls and intrusion detection on every node. Security is part of the build, not a later phase.
Reads the protocol when there is no documentation
Reverse-engineered a vendor USB HID protocol from packet captures and shipped a working Linux driver upstream. Undocumented hardware is a puzzle, not a blocker.
Experience
Infrastructure and hardware consultant
DEC Energy, USI startup, freelance- Designed, procured and deployed an on-premise two-node Kubernetes cluster from parts to production: local LLM inference, web hosting, accounting and Gitea/GitLab source control.
- Tuned fan curves and ran thermal bench stress tests so the nodes stay quiet in an open office under full inference load.
- Specified and assembled the engineering team's workstations and remain on-call for support.
IT support technician
Private clients across Ticino, freelance- Built, configured and repaired more than 25 desktop and laptop systems: sourcing, assembly, Windows and Linux deployment, driver debugging, ongoing maintenance.
- Remote and on-site support for hardware failures, software conflicts and local networking faults, with repair logs kept to stop issues recurring.
Infrastructure engineer, self-directed
Four bare-metal servers serving 12+ users- UNRAID, Proxmox VE 8, TrueNAS, Docker and LXC running production workloads without any managed hosting.
- Delivered a turnkey rack for a client: cabinet, chassis, structured cabling, TrueNAS with ZFS RAID 10, per-user ACLs and automated offsite snapshots with under thirty minutes of recovery time.
- Hardened every edge: no open WAN ports, SSO and 2FA, intrusion detection, host-level firewalls.
Open source, close to the metal
Upstream contributions to projects that sit between hardware and the kernel. Hover a row and the sculpture becomes the work.
libratbag/libratbag
PR #1873
A complete USB HID device driver, written from a packet capture
Sniffed the vendor's raw HID reports in Wireshark, decoded the byte layout for DPI profiles, polling rates and on-board memory, then wrote a complete C driver that was merged upstream.
ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux, Vysp3r/ProtonPlus
Issues #13248, #1232
Runtime installation pipeline fault, diagnosed and fixed upstream
Traced execution crashes in the Steam Linux Runtime to unwritten manifest files, documented a depot recovery workaround and contributed code to automate runtime integrity checks.
Recol/DLSS-Updater
PRs #283, #252, #256
Multi-vendor upscaler library detection
Replaced brittle static tables with bounded manifest parsing so NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS libraries survive DLL upgrades; also fixed UI state desynchronisation.
Selected projects
Homelab as code
Four production hosts rebuilt from bare metal by Ansible in under thirty minutes. Twelve-plus daily users, no exposed WAN ports: Cloudflare Tunnels, WireGuard, SSO with 2FA and Fail2Ban on every node.
Ansible, Docker Compose, UNRAID, Grafana, Prometheus
Turnkey TrueNAS rack
A 19-inch cabinet for a private client: patch panels, storage chassis and nine drive bays, every cable run dressed and labelled. TrueNAS on top with ZFS RAID 10, per-user ACLs and offsite snapshots for a sub-30-minute recovery target.
TrueNAS, ZFS, rack infrastructure, structured cabling
ObsidianSetup 26 stars on GitHub
Cross-platform provisioning utility for environment configuration and plugin management, adopted by other users.
PowerShell
City simulator, USI group project
Coordinated a twelve-person Scrum team building a full-stack city simulation. Owned the Spring Boot backend and its integration with the web frontend.
Java, Spring Boot, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
Tools I reach for
Also on the bench: Rust, C, C++, Python and SQL for diagnostics, and a self-directed track on local LLM deployment and quantisation on bare-metal hardware with llama.cpp and Claude Code.
Education and languages
- BSc Economics, English stream
- Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, since September 2024. Microeconomics, game theory, quantitative finance, statistics, financial modelling.
- Computer science coursework, two full years
- USI, 2022 to 2024. Algorithms and data structures, object-oriented systems in Java and C++, software architecture, discrete logic.
- Maturità Cantonale and Federal VET Diploma, AFC Economics
- Scuola Cantonale di Commercio, Bellinzona, 2018 to 2022. Maturità 4.5/6, AFC 5/6.
- Certifications
- Google IT Support Professional Certificate. Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate. Microsoft Foundations of IT Systems, Networking and Data Protection.
- Languages
- Italian nativeEnglish C2German B1–B2Spanish A1Norwegian A1
- Status
- Italian national, Swiss Permit C, born 2001.