Juan Buhagiar Duijst

Engineering Manager & Software Architect

Engineering Manager with 5+ years of people leadership experience in distributed trading platforms and fintech. I build and scale engineering organizations, lead cross-functional teams, and keep enough architectural depth to make robust decisions in high-throughput, event-driven systems.

About Me

Engineering Manager for trading & fintech

I'm an Engineering Manager and Software Architect with deep experience in energy trading, fintech, and high-throughput event-driven systems. I combine people leadership with hands-on architectural oversight to help teams ship reliable, scalable platforms.

I have a proven track record building and scaling engineering organizations from the ground up: hiring talent, establishing processes, and mentoring engineers through their career growth while aligning technical roadmaps with commercial goals.

My technical background spans AWS/Kubernetes, Java/Spring, and CQRS/event sourcing, and I'm known for creating collaborative cultures, transparent decision-making forums, and operationally excellent delivery in production environments handling 10M+ daily orders.

Based in Ħamrun, Malta, I prefer Malta or remote roles. I also contribute to sustainable mobility initiatives as Vice President at Rota.

16+
Direct reports managed
10+
Years of software development
5+
Years in people leadership

Leadership & Technical Skills

🎯 Leadership & Management

  • Team scaling & organizational design
  • Hiring & candidate assessment
  • Structured onboarding & playbooks
  • 1:1 coaching & career development
  • Performance reviews & calibration
  • Cross-team alignment & stakeholder management
  • Incident command, post-mortems & process design (Scrum, Kanban)

🏗️ Software Architecture

  • Event-driven systems (CQRS, event sourcing)
  • Distributed systems & microservices
  • Monolith-to-microservices transitions
  • Domain-driven design
  • Scalability at high throughput
  • Disaster recovery & resilience

☁️ Cloud & Platform Engineering

  • AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, IAM, CloudFormation)
  • Multi-account setup & security
  • Kubernetes (networking, storage, security)
  • Docker & infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi, Ansible)
  • On-premises to cloud migration & cost optimization

💻 Backend Development

  • Java, Spring Framework, Spring Boot
  • Axon Framework (CQRS/event sourcing)
  • MongoDB & PostgreSQL
  • Event streaming (RabbitMQ, Kafka)

📊 Observability & Reliability

  • Distributed tracing (Datadog)
  • Performance profiling & optimization
  • Incident management & post-mortems
  • Blue-green deployments & release strategy
  • Chaos engineering principles

🌍 Community & AI

  • Team coaching & workshop facilitation
  • Sustainable mobility & community projects
  • Computer vision & ML fundamentals
  • Multi-modal sensor fusion & image processing

Professional Experience

Engineering Manager – Trading Platform
ETPA – Amsterdam & Valletta
Jan 2026 – Present
Software Development Lead / Architect – Trading Team
ETPA – Amsterdam & Valletta
Nov 2021 – Dec 2025
Software Developer
ETPA – Platform
Jul 2017 – Nov 2021
Computer Vision Engineer
Bright River – Netherlands
Oct 2019 – Dec 2019
Additional Experience
Captain AI, Ixaris, IAESTE ASBL, ESI Ltd.
2014 – 2019

Education & Recognition

Academic Credentials

Master of Science (MS), Artificial Intelligence
University of Amsterdam
2017 – 2019
Thesis on temporal localization of actions in untrimmed videos.
Bachelor of Science (BSc), Artificial Intelligence (2:1)
University of Malta
2014 – 2017
Exchange Semester, Artificial Intelligence
University of Groningen
2017

🏆 Awards & Recognition

The Next Web T500

Featured as one of 500 most ambitious young talents in technology.

2017 & 2019

🌱 Community Leadership

Vice President, Rota
Sustainable mobility advocacy & community projects
March 2023 – March 2025

Let's Connect

I'm interested in engineering manager and leadership opportunities where I can help grow teams, shape technical roadmaps, and deliver reliable platforms in complex domains. Feel free to reach out.

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