Massimiliano Ciccone

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT MASSIMILIANO CICCONE

I have always been fascinated by data management and in particular use cases requiring high-speed data movement and processing.Starting as an on-board data handling and software engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands where I spent 12 years, primarily participating in the definition and execution of space technology research and development programs.At ESA, I successfully led various projects involving the development of software and hardware units for space data systems, as part of long-term strategic goals for space data handling infrastructure’s evolution.One of the most interesting projects of my career in the space industry was participating in the definition of the communication protocol infrastructure supporting the Interplanetary Internet project started by Mr. Vint Cerf at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (does this name ring a bell?As a unique ESA member in a worldwide team of four space data system experts, I\'ve also participated in designing, specifying, and prototyping a File Delivery Protocol for space links (CFDP); used for the first time to deliver images of the NASA comet space-probe mission named ‘Deep Impact’.I then decided to put my feet back on Earth and moved to London, joining Informatica in 2012; where Iworked as a presales engineer in the realms of ultra-low latency, high-performance messaging middleware, and at-scale streaming data engineering.I have recently joined Confluent, the company founded by the original creators of Kafka, as a solutions engineer. Confluent\'s mission is to put an event streaming platform at the heart of every organization around the world, and I fully share this vision!Over the years, I have successfully led numerous pre-sales engagements, owning the sale cycle from gathering of requirements to technical wins; through crafting complex streaming data management architectural solutions and delivering technical proof of it.