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Michele Durante

Team Lead Payments at RaiseNow | Payment Processing & Acquiring | Cloud-Native Engineering | Compliance & PCI-DSS


Personal Details

Full Name: Michele Durante
Location: München, Deutschland
Nationality: Italian
 
 
Portrait of Michele Durante

About

Payments engineering leader with 10+ years of experience, including nearly 10 years in the payment industry and 8 years in leadership roles. I have a proven track record of building, scaling, and leading engineering teams to improve delivery quality and operational efficiency.

I design adaptable solutions for fast-changing requirements across cloud and on-prem environments, with strong focus on reliability, documentation, and business interoperability. I also integrate AI-assisted development practices, agentic workflows, and AI-powered developer tooling to accelerate delivery, improve engineering productivity, and support high-quality outcomes.

Currently, I work at Raisenow, where I lead payment frontend and backend teams building and maintaining a FinTech SaaS platform for fundraising and donation.

I am extending my payments expertise from engineering to the business and regulatory side, currently through CFTE's Payments in Digital Finance course (money creation, card schemes and payment infrastructure, PSD2, CBDCs). With hands-on experience across the payment chain, from ATM transaction processing to acquiring, I bridge engineering with product, compliance and partner teams.

Frontend/Backend Technologies

DevOps Technologies

PHP, .NET, TypeScript and JavaScript, Java, several e2e and unit testing frameworks, REST, GraphQL, SPA, Git, MySQL, MS SQL, and Oracle.

Linux administration, on-prem and cloud (AWS, Azure), several CI/CD systems, distributed & event-driven systems, Docker, Ansible, OpenShift, microservices, observability principles, AI-assisted software development, AI agents & agentic workflows, AI-powered developer tooling.

Career History

Team Lead Payments
RaiseNow
Nov. 2024 - present
Digital Payments SaaS, 100% remote, Germany
RaiseNow is a payment processor and acquirer for fundraising and donation. I lead a frontend and a backend payment team, consult on technical aspects and work on designing and delivering payment solutions.

  • I helped design, specify, and implement acquiring and payment processing capabilities.
  • I contributed to compliance efforts and PCI-DSS certification work, helping the organisation meet the standards of the payments industry.
  • I led frontend and backend teams in building and maintaining an event-driven, cloud-native SaaS platform.
  • I improved the platform's scalability, reliability, and security by introducing the best development and management practices.
  • As hiring manager, I interviewed candidates for engineering roles and onboarded new team members.
  • I collaborated with product, design, and GTM teams to deliver high-quality software that meets customer needs and business goals.
Team Lead
Euronet
Nov. 2018 - Oct. 2024
Electronic Payments and Financial Services, Munich, Germany
ATM transaction processing. Team size of 6-8 members, part of a team 24-large. I spent most of my time on designing software and/or systems, coaching developers and testers, discussing specifications. The rest was dedicated to hands-on coding, tasks reviews and, when needed, to hiring. I coordinated communication with distributed teams across timezones and released software globally.

  • I developed and maintained mission-critical production code and internal applications.
  • I defined long-term goals for the development team, sharing responsibility for hiring, onboarding, best practices, and Sprint planning.
  • I was responsible for internal and external security audits and compliance with PCI-DSS and PA-DSS standards.
  • I designed, implemented, and maintained automated test suites covering unit, integration, and end-to-end scenarios, optimising them for cloud and on-premise deployments.
Full-stack Developer
Euronet
Nov. 2017 - Oct. 2018
Electronic Payments and Financial Services, Munich, Germany
ATM transaction processing. I replaced much of the legacy codebases and set up modern processes for testing and for the release of software

  • I modernised outdated monolith APIs and web applications (.NET, PHP) into modular solutions.
  • I designed and implemented CI/CD systems and test suites for unit and integration testing (Java).
  • I optimised requirements gathering and product/development processes.
Full-stack Developer & PM
Nowtel
Nov. 2015 - Oct. 2017
Mobile Virtual Network Operator (telecommunication), London, UK
Development of customer-facing websites and APIs for a telecommunication company. I was responsible for the eCommerce websites and related payment services. Finally, I also managed a project with an external design agency to redesign and launch the new websites.

  • I refactored and maintained legacy systems (Java, PHP), worked on data modelling and new web applications in .NET, and implemented several payment providers and payment methods.
  • I analyzed and integrated payment gateways, third-party APIs, website internationalisation, UI/UX design, and customer experience, ensuring consistency across devices and media while working closely with marketing.
Web Developer & PM
Freelancer
Jan. 2013 - Sept. 2015
Business partnership, London, UK
I worked on several projects for startups and small business in London, working together a graphic designer as a business partner under the name Studio Durante.

Junior Web Developer
University of the Arts, London
Sept. 2012 - Jul. 2013
Student/Intern, London, UK
I gained professional experience whilst studying by working on a contract-basis for the University. I joined the in-house development team and shadowed a senior developer working on online and distance teaching/learning platforms.

Education & Courses

Sept. 2010 - Jul. 2013
UAL, London, UK
Digital Media, Computer Science, BA
 Digital media & Design, Multimedia installations, C/C++ programming, PHP programming, Web design, Web development
Dec. 2016
C# Online course (Udemy)
 CSharp programming language, Inheritance, Object-Oriented programming, Access modifiers, Interfaces, MVC5, .NET Framework.
Sept. 2026 - present
Payments in Digital Finance, CFTE (online course, in progress)
 Money creation and money supply, public and private money, payment networks and infrastructure, card schemes, PSD2, digital currencies and CBDCs, payment instruments and processing.

Awards

Jun. 2013 Art Temps, Employee of the year Award Nominee
Nov. 2011 JISC, University of the Arts London. ALTO digital Competition. Winner of the 1st Commended Prize

Languages

Italian Native proficiency
English Native or bilingual proficiency (IELTS 8.5 British Council)
German Basic proficiency (B1.1 Goethe Institute)