About

Davide Spataro

Head of Technology · Software engineer · Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science

I'm a lead software engineer with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and more than seven years of experience building high-stakes financial systems. I've led engineering teams across distributed trading platforms, blockchain infrastructure, and on-chain financial products — with a strong bias toward results, clean architecture, and shipping things that last.

Today I lead engineering at Chintai, where I'm responsible for the backend and on-chain systems powering a digital-asset exchange and a tokenization platform. Before Chintai I worked on the core C++ trading codebase at flatexDEGIRO in Amsterdam, and on overlay-optimization software for ASML's lithography systems in Eindhoven. Earlier I completed a Ph.D. on parallel and distributed methods for many-core systems, with research visits at Edinburgh and Warwick.

My professional interests sit at the intersection of distributed systems, blockchain, and high-performance computing. I write about the craft of building production code — most notably in Coding Interview Essentials, a long-form, hand-authored field guide to algorithmic interviews. I'm an active Stack Overflow contributor and an avid reader of technical books.

Currently

Leading engineering at Chintai as Head of Technology — distributed systems, blockchain, on-chain finance.
Writing Coding Interview Essentials, one chapter at a time.
Based in Italy. Working remotely.
Reachable at hello@davidespataro.dev for technical conversations, consulting on systems / blockchain, or anything related to the book.

Experience

Full version available in the CV (PDF).

2022 – present
Head of Technology

Chintai · Remote (Italy)
- Lead a team of six. Own the architecture, delivery, and direction of the entire backend and blockchain stack.
- Engineered a fully on-chain secondary exchange with an on-chain orderbook — now powering the secondary market on every white-label deployment of the Chintai platform.
- Built an automated market-maker for the CHEX token across four exchanges, handling >$100k/day in volume.
- Designed a mint/burn bridge for the CHEX token spanning EOS ↔ EVMs ↔ Solana — processed over 3B CHEX (≈ $2.1B) in volume.
- Overhauled the Nodeos EOS node software, delivering a fault-tolerant history tool that streams all on-chain actions to PostgreSQL.
2020 – 2022
Software Engineer

flatexDEGIRO · Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Led a team responsible for the core modern-C++ distributed trading codebase.
- Achieved a 2× improvement in order ingestion by redesigning business-critical caching modules in the core C++ trading system.
- Integrated real-time NASDAQ market data into the platform; the pipeline continues to power risk management and order lifecycle today.
2018 – 2020
Software Design Engineer

ASML · Eindhoven, The Netherlands
- Implemented C/C++-11 core software for overlay optimization in semiconductor metrology.
- Benchmarked and optimised metrology code, achieving a 1.66× speedup — directly improving machine throughput.
- Championed TDD adoption and drove the introduction of CI/CD (Jenkins) in the metrology codebase, resulting in measurably fewer production bug tickets.
- Hardened critical legacy C/C++ code paths that had been brittle in production, improving overall system stability.
2016 – 2017
Ph.D. Research Visiting Student

Universities of Warwick & Edinburgh · United Kingdom
- Investigated parallel and distributed visualization strategies for exascale simulations (VELaSSCo project, Edinburgh).
- Developed a multi-GPU rendering prototype for the VELaSSCo project (University of Edinburgh).
- Implemented an efficient tridiagonal system solver within the OPS framework using Intel SIMD (SSE) intrinsics for numerical kernels (University of Warwick).
2014 – 2017
Ph.D. Teaching Assistant

University of Calabria · Italy
- Delivered a six-month course in event programming to ≈ 100 students, guiding them to build fully functional 3D games in Java from scratch.

Education

2014 – 2018

Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science

University of Calabria, Italy

Thesis: Seamless acceleration of numerical regular grid methods on many-core systems. ↗
2011 – 2014

M.Sc. magna cum laude in Computer Science

University of Calabria, Italy

Thesis: Accelerating the new SCIARA-fv3 numerical model by different GPGPU strategies. ↗

Selected publications

Full list at dblp.org/pid/144/4308.

2018

A first multi-GPU/multi-node implementation of the open computing abstraction layer

Journal of Computational Science, Vol. 32, March 2019, pp. 115–124
2018

The Open Computing Abstraction Layer for Parallel Complex Systems Modeling on Many-Core Systems

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Vol. 121, pp. 53–70
2016

Multi-Agent System with Multiple Group Modelling for Bird Flocking on GPU

Proc. of the 2016 International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), Crete
2015

Efficient Lava Flows Simulations with OpenCL: A preliminary application for Civil Defence Purposes

Proc. of the 10th International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, Krakow

Selected work

Coding Interview Essentials A long-form, editorial field guide to algorithmic interviews.

Contact

Email hello@davidespataro.dev
GitHub github.com/knotman90
Stack Overflow stackoverflow.com/users/1417063
Publications dblp.org/pid/144/4308
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/davide-spataro

Outside of work

I started taking piano lessons as a child and stayed with it long enough to develop a serious habit for classical and jazz. When I'm not coding I'm usually fighting gravity on a race bike or lifting weights in the gym. In the summer of 2021 I cycled solo, unsupported, from the north to the south of Italy — about 1,100 km. I drink a lot of coffee.

Download CV (PDF) →