Mario Dagrada

Mario Dagrada

Developer and manager for scientific software

Welcome everyone!

I am Mario, a scientific software developer and engineering manager based in the Netherlands.

I use this website to keep track of news in my career and showcase some of the projects I have been working on. I also occasionally (and hopefully in the future more regularly) write blog posts on scientific software engineering, cloud computing, DevOps, and machine learning.

Interests

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
– John Naisbitt

I always loved working in small companies where my work has an immediate (and meaningful) impact. Currently, my main professional interests are:

  • Scientific software development: this combines my two main passions of programming and science, especially physics. I have experience in HPC, cybersecurity, and quantum computing.
  • Engineering and product management: I love to start, grow, and continuously improve engineering teams and do the same the with software products.
  • Cloud infrastructure and distributed applications: I have experience in building distributed systems running on public cloud, always with infrastructure-as-a-code.
  • Machine learning: ML is a huge field. I have experience with scientific ML and time series forecasting.

You can find more details on my previous works in the blog and projects or my Google Scholar profile.

Career

Per aspera ad astra.
– The city of Gouda (among others)

Detailed CV in PDF

  • Sep 2020 - Feb 2024 - Head of quantum software at PASQAL (quantum computing): I planned and executed the delivery of the first company cloud-based product. After a promotion (and an acquisition), I managed and grew up to 10 members a team of scientific software developers working on cutting-edge libraries for quantum computing and scientific machine learning.

  • Aug 2023 - AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate: AWS certification testing the knoweldge of its cloud services for building high available and secure applications.

  • Apr 2019 - Jun 2019 - Design-Driven Business Innovation at Amsterdam Business School: an intensive 3-months course which taught me how to ideate, prototype and execute innovation projects within a corporate environment. The course ended with an innovation project proposal which was accepted at my company.

  • Apr 2018 - Sep 2020 - Senior R&D software engineer and innovation lead at Forescout (cybersecurity): a lot of coding and machine learning algorithms to improve the life of security analysts. After a promotion, I became the head of the product innovation team of the company where I led the prototype and later integration into the main product line of several projects.

  • Aug 2016- Mar 2018 - R&D software engineer at Atos Bull (HPC): a lot of low-level coding to make the interconnect of Atos supercomputers faster and help scientists running their codes at maximum efficiency. This has also been my first encounter with Agile since I acted as Scrum Master of a team of 8 for over a year.

  • Oct 2013- Oct 2016 - PhD in computational physics at Sorbonne University in Paris: simulations on high-temperature superconductors and a lot of writing, both scientific papers and a long thesis but especially highly efficient parallel scientific software.

  • Sep 2011- Sep 2013 - Master in Physics of Complex Systems from the Polytechnic University of Turin with a thesis on material simulations for fuel cells carried out in Paris.