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Zürich · Switzerland

Francesco
Staccone

Co-founder & CEO at TravelTribe (founding CTO). Backend Software Engineer and Release Manager at TWINT. Building AI agents that help creators sell trips and experiences.

2,500+ experiences booked · CHF 300K+ revenue · 2× YoY · ex UBS & CERN · MSc Politecnico di Milano (110/110) + KTH Stockholm

Currently scaling

TravelTribe.

AI agents that help creators sell trips and experiences. Powered by TribOS.

experiences booked
2,500+

experiences booked

revenue
CHF 300K+

revenue

YoY growth
2×

YoY growth

Don't travel alone. Travel with the Tribe. Curated group trips and community events built around shared passions, from ski weekends to worldwide adventures.

Visit traveltribe.comAbout the Tribe
TravelTribe community
traveltribe.com
About

Software Engineer by trade. Entrepreneur by heart.

I co-founded TravelTribe in 2024 and now serve as CEO. I started as founding CTO and built the entire platform alone (Java 21, Spring 6.6, PostgreSQL, React, AWS, Supabase, Sentry and Fly.io), then transitioned to CEO to lead expansion and scaling while keeping the technical roadmap. Today TravelTribe is powered by TribOS, our AI agents that help creators sell trips and experiences: 2,500+ experiences booked, CHF 300K+ in revenue and 2× YoY growth.

In parallel I'm Backend Software Engineer and Release Manager at TWINT, Switzerland's national mobile-payment ecosystem, in the Value Stream Payment team. I work on the payment system and business-critical services (including SDPA-compliant reporting) and oversee releases across the ecosystem. Before TWINT I spent 2.5 years engineering secure E-banking and Digital Mailroom services at UBS (account opening, money transfers, e-signature, archiving), and earlier built the back-end of CERNphone and large-scale ETL pipelines as a software engineer at CERN.

Academic background: MSc Computer Science 110/110 with honors at Politecnico di Milano (2019) and MSc Data Science Double Degree at KTH Royal Institute, Stockholm (2020), where my thesis (final grade A) applied GANs and CNNs to SAR satellite imagery within the Extreme Earth project, detecting drifting icebergs and signalling their position to passing ships. Awarded the Ermenegildo Zegna Founder's Scholarship in 2020. Italian (native), English (TOEFL, Cambridge First), French (DELF B2), basic German.

Francesco Staccone under the Aurora Borealis in the Scandinavian Arctic
Aurora Borealis · Norway
Off-screen

30+ countries and counting.

Travel is the lived foundation behind TravelTribe. Outside engineering and the company, I run on road trips, mountains and shared adventures with the Tribe.

HikingMountain bikingSnowboardingSailingRoad trips
Selected work

From CERN and KTH to TWINT and TravelTribe.

A decade of industrial software, AI and entrepreneurship. Snapshots of the projects I'm most proud of.

TravelTribe2024 → now

TravelTribe Platform

Co-founder & CEO · founding CTO and sole technical builder

2,500+ experiences booked · CHF 300K+ revenue · 2× YoY growth

Started as founding CTO and built the full-stack platform alone, then transitioned to CEO to lead expansion and scaling while keeping the technical roadmap. Today the product is powered by TribOS, our AI agents that help creators sell trips and experiences. Browse and book group trips and events, submit inquiries, request refunds, run secure payments and bookings. Robust monolith on Java 21 + Spring 6.6, PostgreSQL, React front-end, deployed on AWS with Supabase, Sentry and Fly.io.

Java 21Spring 6.6PostgreSQLReactAWSSupabaseSentryFly.io
Visit live →
TWINT2024 → now

TWINT · Backend Engineering & Release Management

Backend Software Engineer & Release Manager (Value Stream Payment)

Switzerland's #1 mobile payment app · millions of active users

Backend software engineer and Release Manager in the Value Stream Payment team. I develop and maintain the TWINT payment system and additional business-critical services (including SDPA-compliant reporting), and oversee releases across the ecosystem.

JavaSpringWildflyOracle DBElasticSearchKafkaKubernetesAppDynamics
UBS2021 → 2024

UBS E-banking & Digital Mailroom

Software Engineer · E-banking crew

Switzerland's largest bank · digitalising every physical document

Engineered resilient microservices for the E-banking platform: secure account opening, money transfers, document e-signature and archiving. Optimised high-traffic REST and SOAP APIs and XML databases for the Digital Mailroom team. Scrum, JUnit, SonarQube, GitLab, CI/CD with Red Hat Ansible, Splunk and AppDynamics.

SpringJavaRESTSOAPPostgreSQLTomcatKafkaDockerKubernetes
CERN2020 → 2021

CERNphone (Skype-for-Business replacement)

Full-stack Software Engineer Intern

Internal communications tool deployed across CERN

Built the back-end for user registration, call management, log storage and user-settings updates. Real-time Kibana dashboards on top of ETL pipelines streaming into Oracle and Elasticsearch for abuse control and operational reporting.

JavaSpringREST APIsMicroservicesOracleElasticsearchKubernetesAngular
KTH × Extreme Earth2019 → 2020

Deep Learning for SAR Iceberg Detection

MSc Thesis · Final grade A

GANs + CNNs over SAR satellite imagery to flag drifting icebergs to transiting ships

Prototyped and trained an automatic AI classifier on SAR satellite images at the KTH Computer Science department. Generative Adversarial Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks employed; Transfer Learning explored for benchmarking. Models trained end-to-end on TensorFlow + Keras with Google Colab.

TensorFlowKerasPythonPandasNumPyJupyterGoogle Colab
Journey

Milano. Stockholm. Geneva. Zürich.

A decade across four cities, three universities and four engineering chapters that led to TravelTribe.

swipe →
2015 / 2019
🇮🇹

Milano

Italy

Politecnico di Milano

BSc + MSc Computer Science

BSc + MSc Computer Science 110/110 with honors. Foundations in distributed systems, software engineering, machine learning, recommender systems and graph mining. Built a streaming smart-mobility ETL on Kafka + Spark.

JavaDistributed SystemsSparkRecommender Systems
2019 / 2020
🇸🇪

Stockholm

Sweden

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

MSc Data Science (Double Degree)

Final grade A. Master thesis within the Extreme Earth project: Generative Adversarial Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks over SAR satellite imagery to detect drifting icebergs and signal their position to ships. Awarded the Ermenegildo Zegna Founder's Scholarship 2020.

Deep LearningGANsCNNsTensorFlow
2020 / 2021
🇨🇭

Geneva

Switzerland

CERN

Software Engineer Intern

Built CERNphone (Skype-for-Business replacement) — back-end for user registration, call management, log storage. ETL pipelines streaming into Oracle and Elasticsearch with real-time Kibana dashboards for abuse control.

JavaSpringMicroservicesKubernetes
2021 / now
🇨🇭

Zürich

Switzerland

UBS · TWINT · TravelTribe

Software Engineer · Backend SWE & Release Manager · Co-founder & CEO

Engineered E-banking microservices and the Digital Mailroom at UBS. At TWINT: Backend Software Engineer and Release Manager in the Value Stream Payment team. Co-founded TravelTribe in 2024 as founding CTO, built the platform end-to-end, then took over as CEO. Today: TribOS AI agents, 2,500+ experiences booked, CHF 300K+ revenue, 2× YoY growth.

Java 21Spring 6.6ReactAWSKafkaPostgreSQL
Stack

Tools, languages and platforms.

What I reach for day-to-day, grouped by where it lives in a system.

AI / ML

TensorFlowKerasPyTorchscikit-learnPandasNumPyJupyterGANsCNNsReinforcement Learning

Backend

Java 21Spring BootSpring AIWildflyTomcatRESTSOAPJPAHibernateNode.js

Frontend

ReactNext.jsTypeScriptAngularTailwind CSS

Data & Streaming

PostgreSQLOracle DBElasticsearchApache KafkaApache Spark StreamingETLSQL

Cloud & Infra

AWSAzureDockerKubernetesFly.ioSupabaseSentrySplunkAppDynamics

Engineering practice

GitGitLabGradleJUnitSonarQubeJiraScrum / AgileCI/CDRelease Management
Currently

Quick facts.

Industrial scope

Banking. Payments. Travel tech. Enterprise platforms.

Switzerland's largest bank (UBS), Switzerland's #1 payment app (TWINT), CERN, and now TravelTribe.

UBSTWINTCERNTravelTribeKTH
TWINT

Backend SWE & Release Manager

Payment system · Value Stream Payment

AI & ML

TribOS · agents · CNNs

AI agents at TravelTribe. Deep Learning thesis at KTH.

Awarded

Zegna Founder's Scholarship

2020 · 110/110 con lode · Final grade A at KTH

Languages
Italian
English
French
German
Get in touch

Open to advisory and select collaborations.

francesco.staccone@traveltribe.chLinkedIn ↗Download CV ↓
Featured

As heard on.

Podcast · Italian

Riso Patate e CEO

Conversation about the birth of TravelTribe and the vision for the future of travel tech, on the podcast dedicated to Italian founders abroad.

Listen →
FAQ

Quick answers.

For recruiters, journalists, prospective collaborators and the AI agents indexing this page.

Who is Francesco Staccone?

Francesco Staccone is an Italian software engineer based in Zürich, Switzerland. He is the Co-founder and CEO of TravelTribe and Release Manager at TWINT. He was previously a software engineer at UBS and at CERN. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from Politecnico di Milano (110/110 with honors) and an MSc in Data Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

What does Francesco Staccone do?

Francesco co-founded TravelTribe in 2024. He started as CTO and built the entire platform alone using Java 21, Spring 6.6, PostgreSQL, React, AWS, Supabase, Sentry and Fly.io, then transitioned to CEO to lead expansion and scaling while keeping the technical roadmap. He also drives company strategy, legal infrastructure and Swiss Package Travel Act compliance. In parallel he is Backend Software Engineer and Release Manager at TWINT (Value Stream Payment team), Switzerland's national mobile-payment ecosystem.

What is TravelTribe?

TravelTribe is the community-driven platform for curated group trips and IRL events, powered by TribOS, AI agents that help creators sell trips and experiences. 2,500+ experiences booked, CHF 300K+ in revenue and 2× year-over-year growth so far. Swiss roots, global ambitions. Visit traveltribe.com.

Where is Francesco Staccone based?

Zürich, Switzerland. Originally from Frosinone, Italy.

What technologies does Francesco Staccone use?

Java 21, Spring Boot, Spring AI, React, Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Kubernetes, AWS, Docker and Elasticsearch. For machine learning he uses Python, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn and PyTorch, with hands-on work in CNNs, GANs and reinforcement learning.

What was Francesco Staccone's master thesis about?

His MSc thesis at KTH, completed inside the Extreme Earth project, applied Generative Adversarial Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks to SAR satellite imagery to detect potentially dangerous drifting icebergs and broadcast their position to ships transiting in monitored areas. Final grade A.

What awards has Francesco Staccone received?

The Ermenegildo Zegna Founder's Scholarship (2020) for academic excellence and potential, MSc Computer Science 110/110 with honors at Politecnico di Milano, BSc 110/110 at Politecnico di Milano, MSc Data Science final grade A at KTH, and high school diploma 100/100 with honors.

How can I contact Francesco Staccone?

Email francesco.staccone@traveltribe.ch or message him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/fstaccone.