Dario Griffo
Portugal

Dario Griffo

Staff Engineer · Technical Leader

Building reliable distributed systems and empowering engineering teams.

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About

Who I am

Software engineer with 15+ years in the .NET ecosystem, specializing in distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and building high-performing engineering teams.

I care deeply about delivery predictability, code quality, and empowering engineers to do their best work. I believe great software is built by great teams, and great teams are built on trust, clarity, and continuous improvement.

Open source maintainer and Debian packager. When I'm not architecting distributed systems, I'm contributing to the open source community or writing about engineering on my blog.

15+
Years in .NET
4
Teams built
5
Open source projects
23+
Debian packages hosted
Experience

Career timeline

Staff Engineer

Paytently

Jan 2024 – Present
  • Led the architecture and build from day 0 of a distributed payments gateway and financial products, delivered on schedule in 10 months
  • Built internal microservice frameworks: event sourcing on AWS DynamoDB, messaging on AWS SQS + SNS, OpenTelemetry observability in a single line of code, and OAuth2 zero-trust authentication
  • Clients integrate with the platform in days, not weeks
  • Reduced the time to integrate a new payment method from at least 2 weeks to 2 days
  • Led and mentored a team of 3 developers

Technical Leader

Oppl Ltd · England · Remote

May 2022 – Dec 2023
  • First developer at a London fintech, delivering in 9 months an event-driven .NET 7 and Angular platform to manage market portfolios for brokers and large corporations
  • Kept technology costs low while sustaining high throughput for an early-stage startup
  • RabbitMQ for real-time pricing and other data sources, handling 2,500+ messages per second
  • Zero-downtime blue/green containerised deployments with HAProxy
  • 3-minute commit-to-production pipeline with GitHub Actions and Docker
  • Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana

Engineering Manager

Checkout.com · London

Jul 2021 – May 2022
  • Built a team of 7 developers from recruitment to delivery while staying hands-on
  • Delivered a cloud-based, customer-facing API handling up to 200 requests per second, consolidating 2 platforms within 10% of the estimated time
  • Reached predictable velocity within 3 months of forming the team
  • Managed goal setting, tracking, upskilling and mentoring with the SMART framework
  • Mentored junior members across teams and owned the backlog with Product

Senior Software Developer

Checkout.com · London

Sep 2020 – Jul 2021
  • Designed and built an internal REST API centralising access to events for multiple teams, consolidating EventStore + AWS DynamoDB into PostgreSQL
  • Improved the performance of the internal Amazon SQS library with low-level serialisation optimisations, working with the Principal team
  • Built AWS Lambda redundancy for company-wide event handling during transient AWS Kinesis errors
  • Supported the Gateway team on implementation and good practices

Engineering Manager

Fourth Ltd · Barcelona · Remote

Jan 2018 – Sep 2020
  • Hired 3 teams of 7 engineers each, 2 in Bulgaria and 1 in London, including team leaders, developers and QA
  • Migrated the in-house ESB from .NET Framework to .NET Standard, allowing adoption of Linux containers
  • Scaled the forecasting engine from part of a monolith to an event-driven service used across Labour, Sales and Inventory products
  • Reached predictable velocity within 4 months
  • Trained several teams across the organisation on the technology stack

Technical Leader

Fourth Ltd · London

Jul 2015 – Dec 2017
  • Led a team of 5 developers and guided good practices with SOLID and pull requests
  • Implemented CI across the company with Octopus Deploy, replacing PowerShell scripts
  • Moved deployments from monthly to weekly
  • Led the migration of the core product database from MySQL to SQL Server
  • Re-architected an MVC application into 16 background services and 4 Web APIs

Senior Software Developer

Kaplan · London

Jan 2014 – Jun 2015
  • Designed and built a C# MVC application with Entity Framework for custom reports
  • Designed and built a C# MVC, Web API and AngularJS application integrated into Salesforce
  • Maintained the MVC application hosting the company’s product search engine

Software Developer

Bvision · Buenos Aires

Oct 2010 – Dec 2013
  • Built a resource scheduling application with two algorithms to fit client demand across multiple resources and machines
  • Built a billing solution with an MVC application and Windows service for a company with offices in several states
  • Built a finance control application for a US ice maker company
  • Implemented watermarking for multimedia content, integrating C++ and C# in a distributed multi-server application for a large US music distributor
  • Developed a custom WinForms installer for a cloud-based collaborative platform
  • Integrated social network APIs including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Blogger for a US marketing platform
Tech

Tools I work with

Languages
C# TypeScript SQL
Frameworks
.NET Core .NET Framework ASP.NET WebAPI Angular
Cloud
AWS SQS AWS SNS DynamoDB AWS Lambda Azure
Infrastructure
Docker HAProxy GitHub Actions Octopus Deploy
Data
PostgreSQL SQL Server MySQL EventStore
Messaging
RabbitMQ AWS SQS/SNS
Observability
Prometheus Grafana
Architecture
Event Sourcing CQRS Microservices REST Event-Driven
Open Source

Projects

Libraries and tools I've built and maintain for the .NET community.

debian.griffo.io

Community Debian/Ubuntu repository hosting 20+ cutting-edge development tools (Zig, Ghostty, lazygit, Bun, uv, fzf…) with automated builds, GPG signing, and multi-arch support across 9 architectures.

Debian · GitHub Actions Visit mirror →

SHA3.NET

A clean, dependency-free SHA3 (Keccak) implementation for .NET. Supports SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, and SHA3-512 variants.

C# View on GitHub →

Configuration Extensions EnvironmentFile

.env file support for .NET IConfiguration. Seamlessly load environment variables from .env files into the standard configuration system.

C# View on GitHub →

ServiceCollection Extensions Modules

Module-based dependency injection registration for .NET. Organize DI registrations into cohesive modules instead of a monolithic Startup class.

C# View on GitHub →
Writing

Recent blog posts

Technical articles on .NET, distributed systems, and engineering practice. View all posts →

~4 min read

How to Install tree-sitter-cli on Debian: Generate, Test and Run Tree-sitter Parsers

Install the latest Tree-sitter CLI, the tool for generating, building and testing Tree-sitter parsers, on Debian using the unofficial deb.griffo.io APT repository and keep it current.

Read article
~4 min read

How to Install tree-sitter-cli on Ubuntu: Generate, Test and Run Tree-sitter Parsers

Install the latest Tree-sitter CLI, the tool for generating, building and testing Tree-sitter parsers, on Ubuntu using the unofficial deb.griffo.io APT repository and keep it up to date.

Read article
~4 min read

How to Install Fastpotify on Debian: A Fast, Native Spotify Client

Install the latest Fastpotify, the fast, native Spotify desktop client written in Rust, on Debian using the unofficial deb.griffo.io APT repository and keep it current.

Read article
Contact

Get in touch

Feel free to reach out about distributed systems, .NET or my open source work. I respond to every message.

dariogriffo@gmail.com