jb

00 / Engineering Manager · Software Architect

Juan Buhagiar Duijst.

I scale engineering organizations and architect event-driven trading platforms. Five years of people leadership, ten in software, shipping at 10M+ daily orders.

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Direct reports managed
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Years in software
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Years in leadership
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Daily orders supported

01 / what i do

Three things, done well.

Most of my work sits at the intersection of people, systems, and operations. Here's how I think about it.

Engineering leadership

Hiring, growing, and coaching engineers. Designing organizations that ship reliably without burning people out.

Architecture

Event-driven and CQRS systems, monolith-to-microservices transitions, and pragmatic domain-driven design.

Platform & cloud

AWS and Kubernetes at production scale — observability, blue-green deploys, and cost-aware infrastructure.

02 / selected experience

Where I'm focused.

A snapshot of my current and most recent role. The full timeline lives on the experience page.

Engineering Manager — Trading Platform

ETPA · Amsterdam & Valletta

currentJan 2026 — Present
  • Organizational leadership: Lead multiple cross-functional teams (product engineering, platform, DevOps, QA), managing the hiring roadmap and reporting structure for the trading domain.
  • People management: Conduct performance reviews, career development conversations, and manage compensation input for direct reports.
  • Technical & delivery roadmap: Own the team technical roadmap, partnering with product and executive stakeholders to balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural improvements.

Software Development Lead / Architect — Trading

ETPA · Amsterdam & Valletta

Nov 2021 — Dec 2025
  • Team leadership & growth: Managed 16 direct reports across backend, DevOps, and QA; ran weekly 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning, coaching 4 engineers to senior-level promotions.
  • Organization building: Designed and launched the Malta-based engineering hub from scratch: hiring strategy, interview panels, onboarding curriculum, and operational processes (standups, planning, retros, incident response).
  • Architecture & design: Chaired a cross-team architecture review board (5 teams) to standardize patterns, reduce duplication, and enable faster, independent delivery. Led design of XBID integration using event-driven architecture.

03 / toolkit

What's in the toolkit.

Grouped by area — the things I reach for regularly, not a wishlist.

Leadership

Team scaling & org designHiring & assessmentOnboarding playbooks1:1 coachingPerformance reviewsStakeholder managementIncident command

Architecture

Event-driven (CQRS, event sourcing)Distributed systemsMonolith → microservicesDomain-driven designHigh-throughput scalabilityDisaster recovery

Cloud & Platform

AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, CFN)KubernetesDockerPulumi · AnsibleMulti-account securityCost optimization

Backend

Java · Spring BootAxon FrameworkMongoDB · PostgreSQLKafka · RabbitMQ

Observability

Datadog tracingProfiling & optimizationBlue-green deploymentsPost-mortemsChaos engineering

04 / let's connect

Hiring an EM, or building a platform team?

I'm open to engineering manager and leadership opportunities — Malta or remote.

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