He received a Laurea degree in 1999 and a Doctoral degree in 2003, both in Computer Engineering, from the Politecnico di Milano, where he was also FIRB Assistant Professor from 2003 to 2006. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, from 2006 to 2008; Visiting Assistant Professor at the Industrial and Systems Engineering department of Lehigh University from 2008 to 2010; and Assistant Professor at the Mathematical Science department of Clemson University from 2010 to 2013. From 2013 to 2021 he was at Fair Isaac within the Xpress Optimizer team.
Pietro is the author and maintainer of Couenne, a software package for solving global optimization problems. He has collaborated with scholars at the Linköpings Universitet in Linköping, Sweden; Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey; Zuse Institute, Berlin; University of Rome, Tor Vergata; and École Polytechnique, Paris.