Giulio Garofalo
Eleven years across e-commerce at scale, energy, fintech, media and civic-tech — from consulting for large brands to the products I build today.
From a social enterprise startup to Italy's biggest fashion and tech brands, all the way to founding GrowFlow Studio. I changed companies again and again, each time looking for the place where things were done better — until I realized that, at some point, you build that place yourself.
What I can be hired for
Qualified Information Engineer (Italian state examination, Section A)
Section A — information sector · September 2026 sitting
Registration with the Ordine degli Ingegneri is being finalised. In the meantime I can accept party-appointed technical consulting work, which does not require it; activities reserved to registered engineers, starting with sworn expert reports, will follow once registration completes.
I passed the Italian state examination in 2026 — the step that turns eleven years of craft into a responsibility you can sign for, and it opens three different ways of working together.
Three ways to work together
Technical consulting
Fractional CTO, growth engineer, customer success engineer. I come in on a technical product that has to grow and take responsibility for all of it: architecture, team, delivery.
Get in touchExpert reports and technical consulting
Technical analysis of software, architectures, logs and data for civil, criminal and arbitration proceedings: software quality, SLAs, backups, cloud, code ownership, GDPR.
How an instruction worksTeaching and training
Courses for vocational institutes, schools and companies: databases and SQL, web development, systems and networks, ETL, applied AI, project management.
Lessons and classesThe fields I have worked in
Very different worlds, and not by accident: each one taught me something the others could not. Here is what, and with which tools.
E-commerce & Retail
From big luxury and fashion brands to best-in-class e-commerce standards, applied without the enterprise overhead.
AI & Conversational
ShopBrain and AI designed to actually serve the business, not to demo. The human stays at the center.
Data & Analytics
A curiosity for data, grown even outside my role: ETL, dashboards, analysis — because a product has to be seen whole.
Performance, SEO & Frontend
From a large fintech comparison platform and a European energy utility: technical SEO and performance done at scale, where every millisecond counts.
Cloud, Infra & Delivery
From enterprise consulting and large media groups: cloud architectures and reliable deploys, from code to production, no surprises.
Civic-tech & Knowledge Graph
OpenLegis: complex public data — Normattiva, EUR-Lex, the Italian Chamber and Senate — finally made usable.
The thread
For years I looked for the connections between the things I've done: fashion, energy, media, fintech, the social sector, music. From the inside I couldn't see them. Then I understood that the thread isn't in the what, but in the why — and it's always the same.
I always looked for the right context
I moved through ever-larger teams and then ever-smaller ones, convinced that somewhere out there was the place where people worked better, where I could step in and bring my own. Italy, Europe or the US, multinational or family business: I learned that that place, more than finding it, at some point you build it yourself.
I see the system, not the task
I can't look at a project in pieces: I need to see it whole, from the problem to the delivery, otherwise I don't work with the sense of purpose I want. It's the same curiosity that led me, even outside my role, to fall for data — ETL, analysis, dashboards — to understand how something really works, all of it.
Humanity beats technique
I work best with people who are passionate about what they do, even when they aren't technical: they give their best, and it shows. I love teaching and I have almost infinite patience, as long as I see effort. Technique and AI are powerful tools, but for now — and probably for a good while — it's humanity that makes the difference.
I translate two worlds
I don't look like a technical person, and maybe that's an advantage: I explain technology simply to whoever asks. Over the years I've worked hard on communication, on public speaking and on reading people even without words — and on holding a team together around a goal.
The starting point
I graduated, looked at the 'normal' job waiting for me and felt a shiver. I decided it was far more fun to take matters into my own hands and start writing code. One way or another it's what I would have done anyway — and it was also the thing I enjoy most.
Collaboration and passion
I founded GrowFlow because I love what I do and I want to bring it to real people and companies: those who believe in their project and in collaboration. I'm convinced that only by working together, across different worlds, do we get to something good. That, in the end, is the thread — and that's why GrowFlow exists.
The Journey
Foundations: economics, the third sector and the first lines of code
It starts in Rome, with a degree in Economics that lays the groundwork for understanding how companies work. Then the Master in Digital Management between H-Farm and Ca' Foscari. In 2015 I co-founded Henable, a social cooperative building digital services for disability: pitching, business planning, web development and accessibility applied in earnest, because the end users were disabled people. Alongside it, my first developer jobs at Conversa, in Turin.
Enterprise: e-commerce at scale and cloud architecture
At a large consultancy I built e-commerce platforms for fashion and eyewear brands: front-end and back-end components, servlets, REST APIs, SAP Hybris integration, and analytics tracking work. At a second consultancy I moved to cloud architecture for luxury and manufacturing companies: infrastructure as code, serverless applications, data pipelines on Redshift, Glue and Kafka. These are the years I learned what it means to ship something that has to hold in production from day one.
Product, technical leadership and scale
At an open-source enterprise vendor I worked on the product platform, in an international team: core maintenance, front-end components, patches and releases on software installed at third parties. At a European energy utility I led the Italian front-end across distributed teams. At an insurance comparison site I coordinated the optimisation team of a platform serving millions of users: technical SEO and performance at scale, TypeScript on Docker, CI and Kubernetes, and paying down technical debt. At a media group, as Software Architect, I turned requirements into implementable architectures and handed them to delivery teams.
On my own: products, consulting, and an engineer’s signature
Since November 2025 I have worked for myself. GrowFlow Studio is the consulting practice; ShopBrain SRL, an innovative startup, is the product company — a conversational assistant for e-commerce and the B2B applications that share its infrastructure, billing and SDKs. In the same year I passed the Italian state examination: qualified as an Information Engineer, Section A. That is the step that opens the chapter of expert reports and party-appointed technical consulting.
Teaching
It is the thing I have always done, even when it was not my job. Today I teach computer science at Istituto Fauser in Novara — computer science, TPSIT and GPOI — and the rest of the day I write the software I talk about in class. It is not a second job: it is the condition under which the examples I bring are real.
Outside the classroom I started earlier. Between 2015 and 2017, at Henable, I designed and delivered digital skills courses for third-sector organisations and public administration, and programmes for disabled people — which is where I learned applied accessibility properly, because they were the end users. I never stopped: mentoring and training consultancy for startups, public speaking at events and hackathons, some of which I organised myself, and since 2020 the open source packages on npm and PyPI, with the documentation and the support for the people who use them.
And then eight years in companies, from 2017 to 2025, where training is not called training: systematic code reviews, onboarding, junior developers brought up to speed, technical documentation and architectural choices explained to non-technical people. At Accenture, Liferay, Octopus Energy, Facile.it and Sky. When it comes to explaining something difficult to someone who does not know it, those eight years spent doing it in meetings count as much as the qualification.
The full syllabus — modules, hours, prerequisites and what you can do at the end — is in the teaching CV. If you are looking for lessons or a course, the two routes have a page of their own.
Independent project
OpenLegis: making a country readable
A country is governed by its laws, and almost no one can read them. Not because they are secret — they are all public — but because there are tens of thousands of them, they cite one another, they amend by reference and repeal by implication.
Those who can afford to reconstruct that picture — the large firms, the trade bodies, the people who write the laws — have it. Everyone else has the text, which is not the same thing. OpenLegis exists to do that work in public.
It is not a model trained on a folder of PDFs. The graph of relationships between norms is built first — what amends what, what repeals what — from the sources that declare those relationships; only then does the agent move over it. The method and the tools are those of OSINT: open sources, open standards, steps anyone can retrace.
- Ten connectors onto official sources: Normattiva in Akoma Ntoso and ELI, the Chamber and Senate in SPARQL, EUR-Lex, the Constitutional Court, the Court of Cassation, CKAN, Eurostat.
- RepublicMCP, the Chamber and Senate connector, is open source under an Apache licence and published on npm: 53 tools over the two official ontologies, hand-mapped because they diverge exactly where queries fail silently.
- The limits are stated before anything else: public offices and public data, never private citizens; every claim traces to a citable source; no legal advice.
Beyond the code
These things have nothing to do with work directly, but they explain fairly well how I work.
Music, always
Conservatory: sax and piano, then bass because the piano bored me and I preferred punk. I'm not a musician, but music is always there: I listen to everything, even opposite genres, and I fixate on a single song for months (lately free jazz, trap, psychedelic rock). It's also the reason I built signorg.ai.
People
What I like most, in and out of work, is talking with people: traveling, discovering, thinking outside the box with someone interesting. The best ideas almost always come from there.
Sea and open air
I do sport mostly outdoors, and the sea is home. Not much for team sports: I prefer the things where how you move is what counts.
Apulian cooking
I'm from Puglia: I live on olive oil, tomatoes, bread and fish. At a restaurant I'm one of those who know exactly what they want and what quality is — the same care I try to put into products.
Writing
I write a lot, but I usually keep it to myself. The blog is my attempt to bring it out: for now it runs almost on autopilot, but it's something I'd like to take much better care of.
Education
2023 - 2025
Master's Degree in Management Engineering
Unimercatorum
2014 - 2015
Master in Digital Management
H-Farm / Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Startup management, social media, public speaking, gamification
2016 - 2017
BSc in Computer Science — not completed
Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Programming, mathematical and statistical foundations, data analysis
2011 - 2013
Bachelor's Degree in Economics
UNINT - International University of Rome
Business management, process analysis, information systems
Let's work together?
If you have a project you truly believe in — a product to build, a team to lead or an idea to explore — let's talk.