Summary
Lead engineer with 25+ years building enterprise-grade backend and distributed systems across financial services, trading platforms, payments, streaming, retail and utilities. On top of broad delivery at scale, I bring a deep specialism in market infrastructure — order matching engines, FIX connectivity and Alternative Trading Systems.
I design full-lifecycle systems — API-first interfaces, event-driven backends, cloud-native infrastructure — grounded in Domain-Driven Design, Test-Driven Development and Clean Code. I run an AI-augmented workflow (Claude Code, Codex) to accelerate delivery while keeping tests, code review and architectural ownership as the quality gates.
Experience
Monark Markets
Head ATS Engineer
Contract · part-time to Apr 2025, full-time since
- Monark enables brokerage and wealth platforms to offer private-market investments via API. I joined at inception as the second engineer — Monark acquired LEX Markets' software and legal assets, including the original matching engine I helped build — and lead its core matching engine and trading infrastructure.
- Led development of the back-office platform for positions, lot and lot allocation, settlement for communicating with Transfer Agents, and Omnibus for Registered Funds.
- Contributed to the C#/.NET primary offerings platform, including SPV and Pre-IPO offerings, by delivering API features and incremental enhancements.
- Integrated with FINRA ORF, Apex Clearing, and nTier for CAT reporting. Also integrated with UMS (Nasdaq's matching engine) for trade execution.
- Collaborated with product and legal teams to align platform capabilities with regulatory frameworks.
- Building integrations with third-party data providers such as Yahoo Finance and Sacra to enrich private market data.
- AI-augmented delivery: I operate a custom agentic workflow on Claude Code and OpenAI Codex — bespoke slash-command automations (planning, code review, endpoint scaffolding, DB migrations), a structured project-context (CLAUDE.md) system that steers the agents, and large-context whole-repo reasoning. An iterative, test-first loop keeps me as the quality gate, and has driven a marked drop in defects and smoother cross-system integrations.
AstraZeneca
Senior Software Engineer
Contract
- Contributed to an R&D initiative to unify access request forms for internal studies, focusing on infrastructure, backend, and build pipelines.
- Helped develop a platform to streamline the end-to-end user journey and accelerate data access via Access Policy enablement.
- Built integration pipelines for DEID tracker integration and data normalisation.
- Wrote BDD test scenarios aligned with feature requirements.
Sky
Senior Software Engineer
Contract
- Redeveloped the Bookmarking Service, a high-traffic system handling up to 2,500 req/s, using Java 17 and Spring Boot.
- Built and deployed services on Kubernetes, leveraging Kafka for event-driven processing and scalable storage.
- Contributed to the modernisation of a core database-backed service for storing critical user activity.
- Ensured high availability through proactive monitoring using Prometheus, Grafana, and Alert Manager.
- Identified and resolved bottlenecks with Gatling performance testing.
LEX Markets
Lead Software Engineer — Trading Systems
Contract, then employee
- Responsible for the full lifecycle of an Alternative Trading System (ATS) for a New York-based startup.
- Designed and implemented an Order Matching Engine using CQRS and event-driven architecture — later acquired by Monark and carried into its platform.
- Built a Market Data service publishing real-time events to subscribers.
- Developed a FIX Adapter service and integrated the Investor Platform with the Order Matching Engine.
- Integrated with Nasdaq's UME, FINRA ORF, and Apex Clearing systems.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines with Terraform and GitHub Actions.
National Trust
Senior Java Developer
- Designed new architecture using AWS DynamoDB and S3 for the National Trust Revenue applications (Join, Renew, Donation, MyNT).
- Created new services for the Donate application and developed features for existing services.
- Mentoring of junior members and apprentices.
- Strong focus on quality: clean code, pair programming, TDD, and BDD with Cucumber and Cypress.
Appsbroker Consulting
Senior Java Developer
- Worked on Project Sentinel delivering a MiFID II compliant solution to a consortium of global banks with Google and Adaptive.
- Integrated the compliance service with Trax Markets and TRADEcho via FIX protocol.
- Implemented the events service aggregator for trading events into BigQuery.
- Implemented the reference data REST API.
Visa Europe
Lead Software Engineer
- Delivered new services and propositions for Visa's innovation hub (Visa Europe Collab).
- Led the Checkout team for Visa's digital wallet, managing APIs for payment service providers and merchants, overseeing a team of six developers and three QAs.
- Played a pivotal role in re-architecting and redeveloping the system for scalability and performance.
- Provided leadership and mentoring to the Mobile team.
Earlier roles
- hibu / Yell (2012–2013) — high-availability image store serving 12M+ requests/month; defined department-wide coding, data-model and versioning standards.
- Cognito (2004–2012) — large transactional workflow systems in Java EE (EJB3, Hibernate, JMS, TIBCO); delivered the largest customer project on time and budget as Technical Lead.
- Caja Madrid, Sainsel Naval Systems & Telefónica I+D (1999–2004) — Active-Directory security/PKI applications, naval simulators, and government emergency call-centre systems.
Open Source
QuickFIX/J Spring Boot Starter
Simplifies FIX protocol integration with Spring Boot; used by trading platforms and financial institutions. GitHub
AssertJ-QuickFIX/J
Fluent, data-dictionary-aware AssertJ assertions for QuickFIX/J messages. GitHub
FixMock
WireMock-inspired mocking library for FIX sessions with a fluent Java DSL. GitHub
Education
Universidad de Sevilla
BSc, Software Engineering
Languages
Spanish — Native · English — Full Professional · French — Elementary