Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Engineering leader with 20+ years building and scaling large, data-intensive and AI-driven systems in fintech and SaaS environments. Currently CTO of an AI-powered SaaS platform, leading engineering, ML, data, and cloud teams across multiple regions, and scaling systems processing terabytes of data with production inference workloads. Previously led large engineering and architecture functions in global financial institutions, operating in regulated, high-availability environments. Extensive experience designing and operating distributed systems and AI platforms.
CTO of a SaaS product designed to leverage terabytes of data generated by reinforcement learning algorithms. Responsible for driving the technology vision, product development, and scaling the technical infrastructure. Managed a hybrid team across Dubai, India, and Spain, delivering a production AI platform used by paying customers. Responsibilities - Lead and manage engineering, ML, data, QA, and DevOps teams across multiple regions, scaling the organisation from three founders to over 20 engineers and specialists within a 30+ person company. - Own the end-to-end system and solution architecture, including distributed data pipelines, ML training workflows, and production inference systems. - Owned cloud spend budget, predominantly for ML training workloads, introducing cost controls and capacity planning to balance experimentation speed with financial discipline. - Set engineering standards and best practices across teams, covering code quality, performance optimisation, CI/CD, testing, and observability. - Collaborate closely with product and business leaders to translate company goals into a clear technical roadmap. - Operate production ML training and inference systems with strict latency, availability, and cost constraints, optimising cloud infrastructure for high-compute workloads. Key Achievements - Scaled the technical organisation and platform as the company grew rapidly across multiple countries. - Established engineering, QA, and DevOps functions from the ground up, enabling consistent delivery at scale. - Designed and evolved core systems for performance, reliability, and efficient cloud usage. - Strengthened product quality and user experience by introducing structured collaboration across teams.
Led engineering for PagoNxt Consumer (formerly Santander Digital), one of the group’s global fintech units. Reported directly to the business unit CTO and operated in a highly regulated environment, overseeing the delivery of cloud-native products in Open Banking, BNPL and P2P payments. The role combined people leadership, architectural ownership, and coordination with senior stakeholders across the bank. Key responsibilities and scope - Owned engineering planning, budgets, and capacity, ensuring predictable delivery across multiple squads. - Provided hands-on technical leadership and architectural direction for cloud-native services used at global scale. - Built and developed the engineering function, defining ways of working, QA strategy, operational processes, and the IT service delivery model. - Ensured compliance with regulatory, security and risk requirements; worked closely with Legal, Compliance, FinCrime and Customer Support. - Oversaw technology for the Innovation pipeline, evaluating and incubating new product concepts. - Worked with central Santander groups (Global CTO, CISO, Cloud) to align platforms, security controls, and standards. Selected projects - Open Banking & Expense Splitting (UOwe) — AISP/PISP-regulated application (FCA-approved) enabling account aggregation and payments initiation. - Social P2P Wallet (Bueno) — Designed and delivered core services for a digital wallet and P2P payments product.
Led engineering initiatives within Santander Digital focusing on two strategic programs: the launch of the group’s e-commerce lending (BNPL) capabilities and the development of the observability platform supporting multiple business units. Operated as a technical lead with delivery responsibility across cross-functional teams. Key responsibilities and scope - Directed engineering workstreams for BNPL, defining architecture, integration patterns, security constraints, and operational processes. - Coordinated delivery across product, design, QA, security, and external partners, ensuring alignment with group standards and regulatory requirements. - Led the creation of the observability platform (monitoring, logging, alerting), establishing foundations that later scaled across other units. - Drove adoption of cloud-native practices, reliability engineering principles, and automation within the teams. - Managed planning, execution, and risk handling for both programs, reporting to senior technology leadership. Selected contributions - BNPL / e-commerce lending — Delivered core services enabling merchant integrations, credit decisioning flows, and real-time customer experience. - Santander Digital observability platform — Designed and rolled out the initial observability stack, improving service transparency and reducing operational incidents.
Led the Data Architecture function within Santander Global Technology, reporting to both the Global CTO and Global CDO. Acted as design authority for the group’s data domain, defining technology strategy and enterprise data architectures across big data, analytics and AI, storage and virtualisation, and data management. Worked across multiple countries and business units in one of the world’s largest regulated financial groups. Key responsibilities and scope - Built and led a team of senior data and solution architects, providing technical direction and establishing architectural governance across the group. - Defined and communicated the global data architecture vision and roadmap, ensuring alignment with business priorities and regulatory and risk constraints. - Designed reference architectures and standards used across multiple business units, influencing major platform and vendor decisions. - Worked closely with business leaders to translate strategic needs into long-term technology capabilities. - Collaborated with domain architects (risk, treasury, payments, channels, cloud, security) to ensure consistency and interoperability across the enterprise landscape. - Managed budgets, resource planning, and project prioritisation for the data architecture portfolio. - Monitored emerging technologies and evaluated their applicability to global programs. Selected contributions - Provided architectural leadership for major transformation initiatives at Santander Headquarters across capital management, risk, treasury, and regulatory compliance. - Drove the adoption of scalable analytics and AI platforms, setting the foundation for later group-wide implementations.
Served as programme engineering manager within Santander UK’s Big Data organisation, supporting more than 120 engineers across 15 teams. Combined technical leadership with delivery oversight, acting as the bridge between architecture, engineering, infrastructure, and business stakeholders. Focused on enabling large-scale data platforms and modernising critical systems. Key responsibilities and scope - Led project intake and early design phases: requirements analysis, solution architecture, and transition into development. - Defined and evolved the Cloudera-based Hadoop platform architecture; primary link between engineering and infrastructure teams. - Drove engineering excellence across teams, promoting CI/CD, scalable design patterns, and robust data architecture practices. - Ran internal and external proofs of concept and proofs of technology, evaluating tools across the big data ecosystem and managing vendor engagement. - Provided architectural support to multiple squads delivering high-volume, regulated workloads. Selected contributions - Involved in 30+ initiatives across reporting, digital transformation, real-time pipelines, and regulatory compliance. - Delivered MI and reporting workloads on the data lake, including dashboards and batch processes. - Supported API- and microservices-based modernisation programs replacing legacy mainframe functionality. - Designed near–real-time ingestion pipelines combining CDC from mainframe systems with Ab Initio and Kafka. - Contributed to major regulatory efforts including FSCS, Open Banking, PSD2, and GDPR (data selection, masking, portability).
Technology consultant, focused on big data and financial services (banking and insurance). After a short assignment in AXA, I was assigned as an extern to Santander UK. Participated in the entire lifecycle of the consulting engagement, from proposal to delivery.
Principal architect in a big data programme to create a Data Analytics marketing platform for Standard Chartered Bank. Working with a team split among Chennai, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Built a team of individual contributors in Chennai and Kuala Lumpur. Defined methodologies, promoted best practices and created team culture. Created a scalable Data Lake to maximise the value of data through the three basic concepts of Big Data: variety, volume and velocity. Created a Data Mart to enable Data Mining by the business analyst CoE team based in Bangalore (India). Designed and integrated real-time processing applications to promote individual targeted geolocated marketing actions. Integrated third-party applications to consume data from the Data Mart and capture the output for further analysis. Led in the analysis and development of logical and physical data models. Understand and communicate how data models can support, interact and integrate with other information systems. Communicating to the stakeholders. Identify and mitigate risks associated with the architecture. Led the system analysis to detect deficiencies and propose solutions for improvement, including architectural and design patterns. Conducted the study of new technologies, frameworks and market trends and how can they impact the current systems. Manage and mentor members of the development team. Technologies used in the project include: Hadoop ecosystem applications on Hortonworks Data Platform. Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) for monitoring and log visualisation.