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About

Vincenzo Imperati

I am a software engineer focused on backend systems and data infrastructure. I work on acquisition, storage, query correctness and recovery, and operate the systems I build.

That work spans BigBrotr, an OpenSats-funded platform combining event archiving with active relay monitoring; the analytical data layer of a live game; and large-scale web measurement.

I am first author of a USENIX Security 2025 paper and an active contributor to the Nostr protocol. Based in Zurich and available now for software engineering roles.

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Experience

Aug 2025 – Present · Zurich

Software Engineer · OpenSats

  • Independently build and operate BigBrotr, an OpenSats-funded platform combining verified event archiving with active health and uptime monitoring of 5,000+ Nostr relays, preserving where each event was observed.
  • Separate durable journal records from rebuildable ClickHouse indexes. Recovery tests reconstruct event content, relay provenance and tags after database loss without recollecting the archive from relays.
  • Run journal replay in a dedicated Go worker so the service scheduler can start other tasks without waiting for the indexing backlog to drain, while preserving a single ordered ClickHouse writer.
  • Make lossless compression recoverable across interruption by flushing and verifying the compressed journal copy before retiring the raw source. Keep ingestion checkpoints behind sealed, durable records.
  • Own self-hosted deployment and operations on Linux, Proxmox and ZFS, including storage, backups, application and host monitoring, and alerts through Prometheus and Grafana.
Read the case study →

Sep 2024 – Jul 2025 · Rome

Software Engineer · Freelance

  • Delivered the field application for Gen4Olive, an EU Horizon 2020 research project, giving agronomists access to 600+ olive cultivars with camera capture, image preprocessing and model-assisted cultivar and disease recognition.
  • Replaced an Italian SME's paper-based HR records with a Next.js/Firebase operations system, turning record retrieval into a single query, with searchable profiles, document storage, role-based permissions and per-trade competence ratings.

Sep 2022 – Aug 2024 · Remote

Data Engineer · Cantina Royale

  • Unified on-chain transactions, gameplay telemetry, asset metadata and market prices into one analytical layer for a live game's player and economy analysis.
  • Caught and escalated a reward-farming exploit by reconciling on-chain reward flows against off-chain gameplay outcomes.
  • Built a public explorer covering 20,413 in-game assets across five collections, compiling a repository snapshot into SQLite at build time so published data can be reviewed and reproduced.
Read the case study →

Apr 2021 – Jul 2023 · Rome

Teaching Assistant · Sapienza University of Rome

  • Supported 200+ students in programming and algorithms through weekly teaching sessions, exercise review and exam preparation.

Research

All research →

2025

Hard to See, Harder to Block: Exploring the Challenges in Email Tracking Pixels Detection

IEEE Access

Federico Cernera, Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, Eugenio Nerio Nemmi, Luciano Ortenzi, Francesco Sassi

2025

The Conspiracy Money Machine: Uncovering Telegram's Conspiracy Channels and their Profit Model

USENIX Security 2025

Vincenzo Imperati, Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Alberto Maria Mongardini, Francesco Sassi

Open-source contributions

Merged contributions to protocol specifications, storage correctness and application security.

Protocol specifications

Four merged changes to the Nostr protocol specification: normalising `d`-tag handling for non-Latin scripts in NIP-54, migrating its wiki format from Asciidoc to Djot, clarifying query `limit` behaviour, and correcting links across the specifications.

nostr-protocol/nips →

Infrastructure and storage

Two merged fixes to fiatjaf/eventstore, including a tag-index correction that prevents a query for one tag from matching another. A merged correction in nopayloaddb, used by sPHENIX and Belle II, fixes calibration lookup ordering. Further query-efficiency and error-handling proposals are described separately on the project page.

fiatjaf/eventstore →BNLNPPS/nopayloaddb →

Security and data protection

Merged a path-traversal fix in INSPIRE-HEP's plot extractor to prevent crafted archives from writing outside the extraction directory. Merged fixes in bio-block address formula injection in anonymised exports and an ownership-hijack path in its document-storage contract.

inspirehep/plotextractor →healthyinc/bio-block →

Research tooling

Merged contributions to three repositories of the Sapienza systems lab, including the Telegram dataset tooling that underpins the measurement work.

SystemsLab-Sapienza/TGDataset →

Selected projects

All projects →

Awards & recognition

  • 2026Built with Claude Code programSelected for the 500-participant builder program; developed Entangle during the hackathon.
  • 2025OpenSats GrantCompetitive open-source funding for BigBrotr.
  • 2025Outstanding University StudentSapienza University of Rome.
  • 2023–202517 prizes across 10 international hackathonsLeading teams of 3–5 from idea to working prototype in 24–48 hours.
  • 2023MSc Honors ProgramCompleted Sapienza's master's excellence track.
  • 2021BSc Honors ProgramCompleted Sapienza's bachelor's excellence track.

Education

Mar 2026 – Aug 2026

Visiting Researcher

University of Zurich

Research in the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies group, studying decentralized networks, open protocols and structural centralization.

Sep 2025 – Feb 2026

Visiting Researcher

ETH Zurich

Research in the Distributed Computing group (DISCO), focused on empirical measurement and analysis of distributed systems and open protocols.

Nov 2023 – Present

PhD candidate in Computer Science

Sapienza University of Rome

Data infrastructure, distributed systems, and trust and safety in large deployed open systems.

Sep 2021 – Oct 2023

MSc in Computer Science

Sapienza University of Rome

110/110 with honours; completed the Honors Program excellence track. Thesis on conspiracy-channel detection and monetization at scale, the basis for the USENIX Security 2025 paper.

Sep 2018 – Jul 2021

BSc in Computer Science

Sapienza University of Rome

110/110 with honours; completed the Honors Program excellence track. Thesis on reinforcement learning for home-energy management, smart-grid optimization and EV charging.

Skills

Languages

GoPythonSQLCC++TypeScriptJavaScriptRustBash

Data & storage

PostgreSQLClickHouseSQLiteDuckDBRedisBadgerDBETL pipelinesschema designpartitioningindexingquery optimisationdeduplicationprovenance

Backend & distributed systems

asyncioFastAPIDjango REST FrameworkasyncpgaiohttpREST API designWebSocketsNode.js

Acquisition

web crawling and scraping at scaleHTML/JSON extractionrate-limit and anti-bot handlingnormalisationlarge-scale data processing

Infrastructure & operations

DockerDocker ComposeLinuxProxmoxZFSPgBouncerPrometheusGrafanaAlertmanagerGitHub ActionsCI/CD

Quality

unit and integration testingprofilingbenchmarkingpytestmypyruffgolangci-lintcode review

Data & AI

PandasNumPymachine learningLLM integrationModel Context Protocol (MCP) serverssemantic search and vector storesChromaDBagent-oriented tooling