Salvatore Pinto graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Salerno, Italy. He started working as Trainee at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Rome in September 2008, then moved to the ESA's Research and Service Support team in 2009, supporting scientists in processing Earth Observation data. In 2013 he left ESA to work as Cloud Technologist for the European Grid Initiative, developing innovative Cloud services to scientists. Back to ESA in 2014, he was put in charge of the common architecture and OSS software baseline for the the Thematic Exploitation Platforms projects. He is a major advocate for use of Open Source software and Open Source software development best practices within the Agency, for what concerns the overall ESA's Exploitation Platforms initiative.