About me…

Welcome to my blog that will replace my old webpage. My name is Andrea Lorenzani, I am a software developer since the 2007, when I started by working with Java technologies. Between 2010 and 2015 I moved in France, I was working as a senior engineer for Amadeus, to be honest as a consultant for Astek.

In that period I was mainly developing in C++ with Boost and I was creating scripts for automatise some processes in Python. In these years I worked for several project, one of them was the SMS Check In that was important for me cause I was left alone working on that, so I had to design, implement and follow up any aspect of software development. But I was fully involved in defining the architecture of other products, like the PNR Exchange among GDSes and the TTY IN Sequencing.

In June 2015 I finally moved to UK. Ocado Technology hired me as Senior Software Engineer and I started working with the most recent technologies: Scala, Coffeescript, Cassandra, Kafka, Java, Spring… It was a massive change, nevertheless on June 2016 I was asked to kick off the first project by myself: an alerting system to help Operations to monitor the status of all the components of our system. After several meetings with all the stakeholders we ended up with an architecture based on AWS Beanstalk, Kinesis and Elastic Search/Kibana.
In the meantime I attended several courses: New Relic, the ICAgile Certified Professional certification and, during the free time, I studied Project Management and I got the CAPM certification from PMI.

On January, 2017, I left Ocado. I then ended up working in BBC as Software Engineer for the Media Services team. Despite the great environment, I stayed there only few months, moving to Whitbread on 20th November 2017. Here I was asked to lead a feature team of 5 people. The work was really funny. Unfortunately for different reasons, mainly related culture and management, I decided to move to another company quite soon, in January 2019 I had a contract with Metapack, as Development Team Leader.

I worked here for almost 3 years and an half, owning and managing most of Metapack Postship architecture, and developing some cutting edge projects like an integrator between the main component of the company and an API, based on a CDC service on AWS called DMS, that ended up processing about 200 millions events per day.
Metapack had a great success during the pandemic, but then it went through an acquisition that brought a lot of instability in UK: before the end of 2023 ALL the engineering team was made redundant or left, while the company kept engineers in other countries. I decided to leave at the end of 2022, when the first redundancy rounds were put in place, before getting hit but one of those.
I had an offer from Starling, but Landbay offered a higher package with a lot of benefits, so I chose them, and that has been the first time as Principal Engineer, although the role had a flavor of management because I was assigned to be the Scrum Master, that in that company is a bit of everything.

Unfortunately Landbay has been a very bad choice: nothing of that culture was close to a fit for me. 11 months later I was already working for Charlotte Tilbury, the cosmetics luxury brand. Again, I was a Principal Engineer, even if, again, people management is never totally outside the scope of such senior roles. Mentoring, speaking about growth, managing needs, assessing skills… there was no direct report, but a good percentage of my work was on culture and people growth. Both jobs in Landbay and in Charlotte Tilbury were Java based, with Spring Boot and AWS. A LOT of AWS, because I was very knowledgeable from the work in Metapack, so I actively worked on improving everything AWS related.
But in 2025, the IT market is crazy, and out of the blue Charlotte Tilbury made a round of redundancy in May were they cut A LOT of engineering, me included. The package was generous, it gave me 4 months to reorganize, but again, the market was crazy. I struggled till September, that is usually one of the golden months for hiring: I got 3 offers, and I chose to go back to engineering management as a Tech Lead for the company called TEG (Transport Exchange Group).

In my free time I love going to the cinema, doing photography, hiking, travelling, singing, dancing, do scuba diving and meeting new people. I am also part of a choir.