Luca Milan · Engineering leadership

Turn technology change into measurable delivery.

Hands-on engineering leader with nearly 30 years in software and 10+ years leading engineering organizations across luxury e-commerce, banking, and enterprise software. I design the operating models and engineering practices that let teams of any size ship reliably.

Today my focus is how engineering organizations adopt AI agents to rethink delivery and operations — without giving up judgment, quality, or control.

Nearly 30 years in software 10+ years leading engineering organizations Teams of 20+ engineers, Italy and UK Hands-on: C# and .NET for 25 years

Based in Piacenza, Italy · Send the context, desired outcome, and timing on LinkedIn; CV and direct contact details are shared on request.

Selected outcomes

Evidence from transformations already delivered.

Four cases where leadership, architecture, and hands-on engineering turned into business-relevant change.

Datlas · 2023–2026

Platform modernization and NIS2-ready security

Defined the Kubernetes modernization strategy with full automation (Ansible, Rancher) and GitOps deployments through ArgoCD, standardized CI/CD pipelines for every product team, and built vulnerability control pipelines aligned with NIS2.

Kubernetes · GitOps Standard CI/CD NIS2-ready
Selecta · 2022–2023

API-first revenue in a CTO-equivalent role

Owned the technology roadmap and target architecture for the digital transformation, launched an API-first platform strategy that opened new revenue from third-party integrations, and led the move from monolith to event-driven.

New revenue Event-driven Team topology
myInvenio · 2020

Task Mining, from product to IBM portfolio

Led development of the Task Mining product, integrated into IBM's portfolio after IBM acquired myInvenio, and demonstrated the business value of AI and RPA in enterprise workflows.

Product into IBM AI and RPA Innovation
YOOX NET-A-PORTER · 2014–2020

ML personalization and early cloud at global scale

Led a 20+ engineer innovation team that built a real-time machine-learning personalization platform, improving conversion across the group's global customer base, and brought AWS and serverless into the group from 2016.

Conversion improved AWS and serverless Feature flags · A/B
How I can help

Clear mandates for difficult technology transitions.

Engagements can be fractional, advisory, or embedded in an engineering leadership role, depending on the problem and the level of ownership required.

Engineering leadership and ways of working

Engineering organization design, team topologies, operating models for small and large teams, and transitions from waterfall to Kanban and agile — with hiring, mentoring, and technology roadmaps.

Operating model Team topologies Roadmap

SDLC, platform, and continuous delivery

The software development lifecycle end to end: developer tooling, continuous integration, delivery and deployment, release management, and test automation, on Kubernetes, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code.

CI/CD · GitOps DevSecOps Infrastructure as Code

AI agent adoption

How engineering organizations adopt AI agents to rethink delivery and operations: agents execute inside explicit constraints — scope, verification, stop conditions — while people keep the judgment.

AI agents LLM orchestration Data integration
Experience

Recent leadership roles and the outcomes behind them.

10+ years leading engineering organizations across luxury e-commerce, banking, and enterprise software — always hands-on.

Career Break — Preparing for the Next Chapter

Independent
May 2026 – Present
Piacenza, Italy

A deliberate pause to study how senior leaders can lead with AI agents: redesigning company processes to be more resilient, productive, and sustainable.

  • Writing Il senior amplificato — a book on how senior engineers lead AI agents and agentic harnesses without giving up judgment, with a weekly LinkedIn newsletter of the same name.

Head of DevOps and Automation

Datlas S.p.A. (formerly Selecta S.p.A.)
Aug 2023 – May 2026
Milan, Italy

Led platform engineering, automation, and DevSecOps for all product teams.

  • Kubernetes modernization — defined the strategy to modernize the Kubernetes clusters with full automation (Ansible, Rancher) and GitOps deployments through ArgoCD.
  • Shorter time-to-market — designed and rolled out the enterprise DevOps and GitOps strategy, with standardized CI/CD pipelines for every product team.
  • NIS2-ready security — built control and verification pipelines for vulnerabilities, aligned with NIS2 requirements.
  • Data integration strategy — defined how data flows between the ERP and engineering systems such as Jira and Azure DevOps.
  • Less manual toil — Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and Ansible, plus a shared automation framework.
  • Measurable operations — introduced company-wide engineering KPIs and analytics across all technical domains.

Head of Digital, Architectures, Innovation and Delivery

Selecta S.p.A.
Jun 2022 – Sep 2023
Milan, Italy

Owned company-wide technology strategy and product innovation in a CTO-equivalent role.

  • Digital transformation roadmap — defined the technology roadmap and target architecture for the company's digital transformation.
  • API-first revenue — launched an API-first platform strategy that opened new revenue from third-party integrations.
  • Monolith to event-driven — led the migration to microservices, improving resilience and letting teams deliver in parallel.
  • Faster delivery — redesigned the team topology to cut coordination overhead.

Software Development Lead

OT Consulting S.p.A.
Jan 2021 – Jun 2022
Reggio Emilia, Italy

Led engineering teams on security-critical systems for banking and financial services.

  • DevSecOps — introduced a DevSecOps practice that brought security into the whole development lifecycle.
  • DevOps governance — improved and governed DevOps practices across the teams.
  • Core banking integration — supervised and managed the bank's SOAP services; development on ISAM and the Service Bus.
  • Observability — monitoring and observability across all systems.
  • Team upskilling — coached teams on microservices, Kubernetes, and modern engineering practices.

Head of Innovation

myInvenio (acquired by IBM)
May 2020 – Dec 2020
Reggio Emilia, Italy
  • Task Mining — led development of the Task Mining product, integrated into IBM's portfolio after IBM acquired myInvenio.
  • AI and RPA — demonstrated the business value of AI and RPA in enterprise workflows.

Manager, Fulfilment Automation Engineering

YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP
Oct 2018 – May 2020
Milan, Bologna, London

Led an engineering team across Italy and the UK responsible for DevOps on the fulfilment infrastructure, IBM Sterling, and the group's legacy applications: the operational critical path of its global e-commerce.

  • Fulfilment automation — architected end-to-end fulfilment automation for high-volume order flows.
  • Cross-border team — built and led the team across Italy and the UK.

Manager, Special Projects

YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP
Oct 2016 – Sep 2018
Milan, Bologna, London

Led a 20+ engineer innovation team building next-generation customer experience features.

  • ML personalization — built a real-time machine-learning personalization platform that improved conversion across the group's global customer base.
  • Safer, more frequent releases — introduced feature flags and A/B testing.
  • Early adopter of AWS and serverless — brought AWS and serverless architectures into the group, and spoke on AWS serverless at developer events in 2017–2018.

Tools Domain Manager

YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP
Oct 2014 – Sep 2016
Milan, Bologna, London

Modernized the internal application portfolio used across the company; managed 20+ engineers across distributed teams.

  • Monolith to microservices — led the architectural shift to independent team deployments.
  • CI/CD as the standard — established continuous integration and delivery company-wide, shortening time-to-market.
  • Leadership pipeline — mentored engineers who grew into engineering leaders.
Earlier career
Mahiz Srl — Co-Founder — built an IT consultancy from scratch, with a web application practice serving enterprise clients; led technical teams and client relationships (2012–2014, Piacenza).
Earlier career — independent consultant, developer, and technical lead on banking, e-commerce, and web projects; managed enterprise development contracts (1997–2012).
Core competencies

Practical depth that sharpens leadership decisions.

Breadth matters because it supports better calls on architecture, platform, tooling, and delivery models.

SDLC & Delivery
SDLC design, developer tooling, continuous integration, delivery and deployment, release management, test automation (end-to-end with Cypress)
Ways of Working
engineering operating models and best practices for small and large teams, waterfall, Kanban and agile, and the transitions between them
Leadership
engineering organization design, team topologies, hiring and mentoring, technology roadmaps
Architecture & Protocols
distributed systems, SOA, microservices, event-driven architecture, domain-driven design, hexagonal and onion architecture, API-first, REST, HTTP, SOAP, serverless
Platform & Cloud
Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes (Rancher), GitOps (ArgoCD), Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, observability (Grafana)
Security
DevSecOps, vulnerability management pipelines, NIS2 compliance
AI & Data
AI agents, AI platforms (Claude Code), LLM orchestration (Semantic Kernel), machine learning in product workflows, RPA, data integration, ELT (dlt), Kafka, ElasticSearch
Hands-on, full stack
C# and the whole .NET ecosystem (25 years), Java / Spring Boot, Python, TypeScript, React, Angular, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Thought leadership

Public signals that support executive and recruiter confidence.

Writing, speaking, podcasts, and credentials show how I communicate ideas, not only how I execute them.

Cover of the book Il senior amplificato

Il senior amplificato

Guidare gli agenti senza cedere il giudizio

Leanpub · in Italian · in progress, 2026

A method for senior engineers working with AI agents and agentic harnesses: the agent handles execution inside explicit constraints (scope, verification, stop conditions), while the senior keeps the judgment.

Follow on Leanpub ↗

Il senior amplificato

Newsletter · weekly on LinkedIn since Aug 2026 · 300+ subscribers

Agentic models and frameworks, from the point of view of someone who works with them every day.

Subscribe on LinkedIn ↗

Recent writing on agentic AI, data readiness, and the amplified senior.

I dati sono il fattore abilitante della trasformazione agentica

LinkedIn article

Read on LinkedIn ↗

Podcast

UGIdotNET / DevOps Time — Aumentare la fiducia nei rilasci con i test E2E. Watch episode ↗

UGIdotNET — DevOps verso Platform Engineering: cosa, come, quando e perché. Watch episode ↗

Speaker since 2009 at Italian conferences, meetups, and developer communities, with 15+ talks, most of them with live code demos. Full talk catalogue on Sessionize ↗

AI & Agents

  • Orchestrating LLMs with Semantic Kernel and C#
  • AI-enhanced DevOps

Platform Engineering

  • GitOps with ArgoCD on multi-cluster Kubernetes
  • Application platforms with .NET Aspire and Dapr
  • Developer platforms with Backstage on Azure

MLOps

  • From DevOps to MLOps with Azure and GitHub
  • Continuous delivery of ML.NET models on Azure

Event-Driven Architecture

  • From CRUD to real-time with Change Data Capture (Kafka, Debezium)
  • CQRS information flows with Dapr

Serverless, early days

  • Life Without Servers. Yes We Can! — AWS serverless (2017)
  • Test-driven FaaS with Docker (2018)

Quality & Delivery

  • End-to-end testing with Cypress in DevOps pipelines
  • Domain-Driven Design workshop (2009)

Conferences: DevOpsHeroes (2019, 2022) · Cloudgen 2021 · Global Azure 2021 · A.I. Day 2021 · DevOps@Work 2020 · Come To Code · AngularJS Day 2014 · Microsoft Developer Camp 2012 · NH Days 2010. Communities: DotDotNet, Bologna Developer Zone, weDev (Polo Tecnologico Pavia).

Certifications

GitOps for Enterprise · GitOps at Scale · GitOps Foundations

2025 · Credly

View credential ↗

IBM: Cloud, Microservices, Kubernetes, Data Science

2021–2022 · IBM

Contact

Bring the context. We can quickly test whether there is a fit.

Send a short LinkedIn message with the business situation, the outcome you need, and the expected timing. CV and direct contact details are shared on request.

Discuss on LinkedIn ↗ i-n-f-o [at] lucamilan [dot] eu