Staff Developer Advocate (L6) | Agentic AI & SRE
Specialist | Principal Cloud Architect | University
Lecturer
Location: Zurich, Switzerland · Citizenship: Italian · Google Zurich
Email: riccardo.carlesso@gmail.com
EBE0 E967 B31D 3C78 DEE6 0A08 05EB 97C1 772F 54DE (Key ID:
4096R/772F54DE)Staff Developer Advocate, Principal Cloud Architect, and AI Agentic Systems Engineer with more than 20 years of continuous hands-on experience across distributed systems architecture, site reliability engineering, large-scale enterprise cloud adoption, and software engineering.
Recognized authority in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Generative AI & Agentic Systems (Google Gemini, Model Context Protocol - MCP, Multi-Agent Harnesses), Enterprise Cloud Architecture, and Developer Operations (DevOps/CI-CD).
antigravity-ruby-sdk
(published on RubyGems with dynamic Policy Engine DSL & safety
guardrails) and sre-extension
(Article
· MCP-based autonomous SRE investigation suite).| Category | Technologies & Tools |
|---|---|
| Primary Programming Languages | Ruby (advanced proficiency; Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, LangChain.rb, RSpec), Bash (expert shell wizardry, system automations, POSIX scripting) |
| Proficient Languages | Python (Google Cloud client libraries, Pulumi SDK, data pipelines, tooling), Go (CLI utilities, agent harnesses), SQL (Google BigQuery, Google Dremel, PostgreSQL, MySQL) |
| Historical & Working Languages | C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Prolog, LISP, Pascal, Basic |
| Cloud Platforms & Infrastructure | Google Cloud Platform (Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Build, Vertex AI, BigQuery, IAM, VPC), OpenStack (Nova, Swift), Bare-Metal Hypervisors (KVM, Xen, Ganeti, VMware ESXi) |
| Containers & Orchestration | Kubernetes, Docker, Skaffold, Container Registries |
| Infrastructure as Code (IaC) | Pulumi, Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Crowbar |
| Google Internal Infrastructure | Borg, Piper/Citc, Critique, Fig/Mercurial, Google3, Dremel, Telemetry |
Zurich, Switzerland & Dublin, Ireland · May 2012 – Present (14+ years)
2021 – Present | Zurich, Switzerland - Global SRE Curriculum Ownership (“The Art of SLOs”): - Global co-owner of Google premier SRE enablement program. Authored and recorded the official video course hosted on the public sre.google portal (📹 Watch on YouTube). - Architected Art of SLOs at Scale: produced 30+ reusable modular assets, interactive training exercises, and automated workshop tooling. - Established and nurtured a global community of practitioners and proctors across EMEA, APAC, and Americas. - Led high-touch workshops across Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Italy, personally training hundreds of Google Customer Engineers and enterprise leaders. - Agentic SRE & Generative AI Innovation: - Pioneered the integration of Gemini multimodal models and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) into terminal-based and cloud-native SRE workflows. - Designed self-healing and investigative agent prototypes capable of executing telemetry queries, analyzing metric regressions, performing root-cause correlation, and generating incident postmortems automatically. - Promoted AI adoption in non-Python language ecosystems (authoring open-source architectures with LangChain.rb and Ruby on Rails). - Product Influence & Engineering Feedback: - Direct partner to Google Cloud Deploy, Cloud Build, and Skaffold engineering and product teams. - Conducted detailed friction logging and developer journey testing that drove foundational usability redesigns for developer onboarding. - Authored official tutorials and automated deployment workflows for Cloud Deploy to Cloud Run.
2015 – 2021 | Zurich, Switzerland - Executive & Team Leadership: - DACH SCE Team Lead (2018–2019): Led Strategic Customer Engineering across Switzerland, Germany, and Poland. Partnered with regional directors to scope enterprise engagements, allocate senior engineering talent, and mentor junior colleagues. - Conceived and launched SCE EDU onboarding program, introducing simulation-based interactive training for new Google Cloud architects. - Delivered regular Life of a Zoogler & Google Culture onboarding sessions for cohorts of 70 to 200 Googlers. - Strategic Enterprise Client Transformations: - Lufthansa Group: Technical lead across Infrastructure and Operations Research workstreams. Combined high-performance computing clusters on GCE with petabyte-scale data pipelines. Formally commended by executive leadership as a premier contributor to the partnership. - Deutsche Bank: Architected and executed high-visibility enterprise collaboration and cloud infrastructure proofs-of-concept presented to executive stakeholders. - SAP: Directed technical governance across multiple delivery streams, resolving complex hybrid-cloud networking and interconnect challenges. - Iponweb: Architected the zero-downtime, multi-year migration of an ultra-high-throughput ad-tech platform from AWS to Google Compute Engine. Conducted deep Linux kernel tuning and disk I/O benchmarking on GCE. - Wix: Technical advisor for strategic enterprise adoption of Cloud DNS, steering transition to multi-region cloud resilience. - Ocado, Spotify, Motorola: Provided specialized architectural reviews, disaster recovery drills, and tier-1 incident escalation handling. - Data Engineering & Internal Platform Innovation: - Conceived, built, and launched automated analytics pipelines, business intelligence systems, and operational health tracking infrastructure serving over 1,000 cloud engineers globally. - Led regional enablement frameworks across EMEA and APAC, establishing Centers of Excellence for operational excellence.
May 2012 – May 2015 | Dublin, Ireland & Zurich, Switzerland - GCE Launch & Tier-3 Systems Support: - Supported Google Compute Engine (GCE) through early alpha, beta, and GA milestones, alongside App Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL. - Primary technical liaison between enterprise customers and core GCE development/PM teams in Seattle and Mountain View, triaging distributed systems defects and refining command semantics. - Engineering Tools & Systems: - Developed operational microservices and diagnostic tools to streamline infrastructure mapping, project management, and automated troubleshooting. - Architected high-availability systems on GCE: built reference architectures demonstrating automated failover and state recovery using Google Cloud Storage. - Authored automated fleet provisioning engines in Python and Bash with metadata-based dynamic boot bootstrapping. - Operations Leadership: - Established and led quaternary pager rotations for Cloud Support and TAM teams, defining standard operating procedures and severity runbooks. - Created the internal Big Cluster documentation hub; technical reviewer for public GCE documentation. - Relocated from Google Dublin to Google Zurich in November 2012.
Rotkreuz / Lucerne, Switzerland · May 2023 –
Present
University Lecturer (Docente a Contratto) – Postgraduate CAS
Programs in Cloud Computing - Executive University
Education: Lecturer in postgraduate Certificate of Advanced
Studies (CAS) programs at the Lucerne School of Information Technology
(HSLU Informatik Weiterbildung, Rotkreuz Campus), teaching across two
postgraduate programs: - CAS
Cloud and Platform Manager (CAS CPM) (May 2023 –
Present · 7 consecutive editions) - CAS
Cloud Architecture (brand-new postgraduate
program) - Continuous Academic Engagement:
Delivered full-day intensive Google Cloud Platform (GCP) modules across
7 consecutive CAS CPM editions since May 2023, plus the new CAS Cloud
Architecture program and guest lectures on Software Development at
Google. - Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Curriculum:
Designed and delivers specialized hands-on modules on Google
Cloud Platform (GCP) foundations, enterprise landing zones,
IAM/security governance, Cloud Run & GKE, Cloud SQL, Gemini AI &
Agentic workflows, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices for
experienced IT leaders, enterprise architects, and senior engineers.
Dublin, Ireland · Jun 2011 – May 2012
Cloud Senior Developer (DevOps & Cloud
Architecture) - Cloud Infrastructure
Automation: Architected bare-metal and virtualized private
cloud infrastructures using Puppet, Chef, Ganeti, KVM, Xen, and VMware
ESXi. - Open-Source Crowbar: Core developer and
contributor to Crowbar, Dell
open-source multi-node bare-metal cloud deployment engine. -
OpenStack Core Deployment: Deployed early enterprise OpenStack compute (Nova)
and object storage (Swift) clusters on Dell PowerEdge hardware
fleets. - Development Fleet Automation: Architected and
puppetized the entire internal Linux development fleet (Git, DNS,
OpenLDAP, MediaWiki, Samba, Swift) using automated recipes and internal
tooling (Extropy).
Dublin, Ireland · Feb 2009 – Apr 2011
Network Systems Software Developer & System
Administrator - Full-Stack Development:
Designed and delivered core operational software in Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, and
Bash. Adopted Test-Driven Development (TDD/BDD), DRY principles, and
RESTful architectures. - Request Tracker (RT)
Architecture: Extensively customized Best Practical Request
Tracker (RT) source code in Perl, integrating it with custom Rails
applications and institutional LDAP directories. -
High-Availability Sysadmin: Administered
high-availability production fleets (Debian/Ubuntu) running Apache,
Exim, OpenLDAP, procmail, Pubcookie single sign-on, and MySQL
master-slave replication managed by Heartbeat. - Monitoring
& Telemetry: Configured and maintained Nagios with custom NRPE monitoring
scripts, Munin, and MRTG. - NOC & Operations:
Participated in 24/7 on-call Network Operations Center (NOC) shift
rotas. Managed project schedules and sprint planning as hands-on Project
Manager.
Dublin, Ireland · Oct 2008 – Feb 2009
Senior Software Developer (Embedded Linux & VoIP) -
Developed and customized firmware for embedded PBX telecommunication
devices running BusyBox Linux on MIPS
processor architectures. - Programmed telephony call routing, SIP/VoIP
signaling, and POTS hardware drivers in embedded C and shell scripts
(init, zboot). Customizations for Asterisk PBX. Version control
managed via IBM Rational ClearCase.
Bologna, Italy · Sep 2003 – Oct 2008 (5+
years)
Senior Network & Systems Engineer -
Enterprise Network & Infrastructure Architecture: -
Designed, configured, and administered mission-critical network
backbones and Linux server clusters for Italian regional public
administration and major healthcare entities serving 5,000+ end users. -
Implemented multi-site IPsec VPNs, enterprise groupware (Postfix,
Sendmail, OpenLDAP, webmail), and core switching infrastructures (Cisco,
HP). - Security & Systems Administration: - Managed
Debian and Slackware Linux distributions; tuned and optimized PostgreSQL
and MySQL databases. - Designed network perimeter security using Linux
iptables, stateful firewalls, and Snort
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). - Advanced TCP/IP protocol
debugging across Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels; early IPv6 deployments. -
European Research Projects (FP6/FP7): - Security Expert
and Technical Project Manager on major European Union railway consortia:
Euromain and Integrail. - Authored international
technical specifications for distributed security and communication
standards across European rail networks. - Network Operations
Center (NOC): Served 1 full year on continuous NOC monitoring
and operational support rotas.
Bologna, Italy · 2002 – 2003
Academic Collaborator & Computer Vision Researcher
- Collaborated with Prof. Massimo Ferri teaching Vision
Mathematics in the Master in Mathematics for Applications (focusing
on metric spaces, topology, and surveillance algorithms). -
Post-graduate research associate at the ARCES Research Center:
authored and published peer-reviewed computer vision research: “An
adaptive approach to Shadow Removal for the detection of vehicles in
Video Surveillance Systems and an 8-connectivity labeling
algorithm”.