Daniel Durante, CTO and author

Daniel Durante - CTO & Author

Chief Technology Officer · Author · Researcher · Action Hero
me@danieldurante.com linkedin.com/in/daniel-durante github.com/durango

Professional Summary

The real-life Daniel Durante — yes, that's also the name of the Event Horizon: Inferno character. Other than studying gravitons, I am currently the CTO of Civic-Chain; a Transparency-as-a-Service (TaaS) platform for financial and government institutions. Former CTO of an options and derivatives market analysis platform, author and technical editor for Packt Publishing, consultant and strategist for Fortune 100 companies, and full-stack developer with over 25 years of experience. Developed projects used by companies such as Hubcash, Stripe, and Walmart. If you need a project to go from zero to one, let's talk.
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Experience

CTO & Co-Founder
Civic-Chain
2026 - Present
  • Infrastructure design and implementation following FIPS, SOC-II, and NIST SP 800-57 guidelines.
  • Design and implemented solicitation and proposal procurement process and procedures.
  • Implemented support for multiple stablecoins and FedNow ramps.
Infrastructure Director
LoyalLink
2023 - 2026
  • Architected auto-scaling infrastructure on AWS capable of handling 10x traffic spikes during major on-sale events, reducing page load times by 30%.
  • Architected and deployed cloud-native applications using AWS services, reducing infrastructure costs by 30%
  • Built infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Terragrunt, reducing environment provisioning time from days to under 30 minutes.
  • Developed CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions CI that enabled 50+ daily deployments with zero-downtime releases.
  • Automated infrastructure testing and security scanning, catching 80% of configuration issues before production.
CTO & Co-Founder
Genesis Volatility
2018 - 2023
  • Designed fault-tolerant matching engine architecture achieving 99.99% uptime across perpetual futures, options, and structured products.
  • Built real-time Greeks calculation engine (delta, gamma, vega, theta, rho) enabling dynamic hedging for market makers.
  • Architected and scaled a high-performance derivatives analysis engine processing 500K+ orders per second with sub-millisecond latency.
Principal Developer
FRST
2018 - 2020
  • Maintained an infrastructure (go and rust) for processing real time market data from over 10 exchanges including 900+ markets with a 99.9% SLA.
  • Processed on chain data (UXTO) and using 3rd party vendors to act as verification/Source-of-Truths.
  • Performed DevOps tasks (with Terraform and Saltstack) under AWS. Maintained logs, servers, and managed billing requirements.
  • Mentored and proctored students for an MBA/Engineering program at University of Chicago.

Technical Skills

Languages

PHP 4+, NodeJS 0.6+, Ruby, Python, Golang 1.2+, Rust 1.1+

Frameworks

jQuery, AngularJS, Backbone, Ruby on Rails 3, ExpressJS, Django, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Sinatra, Magento, PhoneGap, Gulp, Grunt, Karma, Protractor, Babel, React/Redux, React Native, InfernoJS, VueJS

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Nginx, Cherokee, Apache 2+, HaProxy, Caddy

Databases

MySQL 4+, Postgres 9.1+, MongoDB, CouchDB, ArangoDB, Redis, Riak, FoundationDB, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB

Projects & Contributions

  • Go-Credit-Card - https://github.com/durango/go-credit-card - Credit card validator written in Go-lang using the Luhn algorithm. Was used in a major credit card processing company.
  • SequelizeJS - https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize - One of the first NodeJS ORMs. Core member, oversees issues, implementation of hooks and various other helper methods.
  • Auth.net CIM - https://github.com/durango/authorize-net-cim - Authorize.net’s CIM API in NodeJS. Previously featured within their documentation.
  • InfernoJS - https://github.com/infernojs/inferno - Previously on the board of maintainers, implemented the initial setup for inferno-redux located at https://github.com/durango/inferno/tree/inferno-redux
  • Author — “Supercharging Node.js Applications with Sequelize” (Packt Publishing, 2022), ISBN-13: 9781801811552
  • Author — “Rust Standard Library Cookbook” (Packt Publishing, 2018), ISBN-13: 9781788623926
  • Technical Reviewer - Packt Publishing “Rust High Performance", published 2018 - ISBN13: 978-1788399487
  • Technical Reviewer - Packt Publishing “PostgreSQL Developer’s Guide", published 2015 - ISBN13: 978-1783989027
  • Technical Reviewer - Packt Publishing “PostgreSQL 9.6 High Performance 2nd Edition” - ISBN13: 978-1849510301
  • Technical Reviewer - Packt Publishing “Rust Programming by Example” - ISBN13: 978-1788390637

Event Horizon: Inferno

The name alone would have been a great coincidence; then I started noticing the other similarities, and things got considerably stranger.