Damian Fernandez

Damian Fernandez

Senior Java/Kotlin Backend Engineer
UAE
Spanish, English, Russian
Contract On-site

About Me

Hands-on Senior Java/Kotlin Backend Engineer with 16+ years building high-availability, scalable systems for banking, insurance, and consumer platforms across Europe, the Americas, and Oceania. Designed and deployed reac…

Experience

Head of Engineering

Southern Code · Remote / United States
Feb 2023 - Jun 2026 · 3 years 4 months

<p>Directed an Azure Pipelines redesign and a new release model, improving delivery predictability across multiple engineering teams</p><p> Strengthened platform resilience through Kubernetes, Istio, logging, and alerting improvements, reducing operational risk</p><p> Aligned product owners, backend engineers, frontend engineers, and QA around a shared technical roadmap</p><p> Evaluated new technologies through proofs of concept and feasibility assessments before adoption</p><p> Mentored engineering and QA teams on coding standards, maintainability, and production readiness</p>

Tech Lead

Allianz Direct · Madrid, Spain
Nov 2021 - Jan 2023 · 1 year 2 months

<p>Led a team of 5 engineers across 5 microservices, driving architectural decisions on scalability and performance</p><p> Delivered 6 rounds of major features to production on schedule and to specification</p><p> Increased unit test coverage and introduced mutation testing, making the codebase safer to refactor</p><p> Coordinated cross-team test strategy as Lead of the organisation's Test Guild</p><p> Resolved production incidents and coached engineers through code review and technical sessions</p>

Senior Java/Kotlin Software Engineer & Security Champion

ING España & Portugal · Madrid, Spain
Aug 2017 - Nov 2021 · 4 years 3 months

<p>Joined as an HCL Infosystems contractor in August 2017 and converted to a direct ING employee in March 2020, recognised for consistent delivery within the same banking environment</p><p> Designed and deployed from scratch a reactive customer information microservice using Java, WebFlux, and VAVR for a multi-country platform</p><p> Delivered GDPR customer data anonymisation to production, alongside core login and digital banking flows</p><p> Built a mutation-testing based quality programme that reduced integration testing and upper-environment deploy cycles</p><p> Reduced test suite execution time by 50% through a parallelisation strategy adopted across developer machines and CI</p><p> Created the team's technical interview framework and served as accredited code reviewer and mentor</p>

Senior Java Software Engineer

Intertec International · Costa Rica
Aug 2016 - Aug 2017 · 1 year

<p>Delivered feature development and production support for a major US banking client using AngularJS and Spring Boot</p>

Senior Java Software Engineer / Scrum Master

Intel Corporation · Córdoba, Argentina
Feb 2016 - Aug 2016 · 6 months

<p>Built a network intrusion detection system while facilitating Scrum for a 6-person team</p><p> Recognised twice for on-time delivery</p>

Senior Java Software Engineer

Magic Memories · Queenstown, New Zealand
Jun 2014 - Jan 2016 · 1 year 7 months

<p>Cut release time from 3 days to 30 minutes by introducing Jenkins CI, static analysis, and staged build promotion across PHP and Java projects</p><p> Built the guest-photo matching REST service linking band scans to park photography</p>

Semi-Senior Java Software Engineer (Contractor)

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online · Córdoba, Argentina
Jun 2011 - Jan 2014 · 2 years 7 months

<p>Built stub REST services simulating backend integrations</p><p> Maintained and extended the production services for the hotels and resorts platform</p>

Semi-Senior Java Software Engineer

Nimbuzz · Córdoba, Argentina
Oct 2010 - Jun 2011 · 8 months

<p>Developed XMPP messaging features connecting IM clients to MSN, GTalk, and Facebook</p><p> Owned a lightweight web client for legacy mobile devices</p>

Junior Java Software Engineer

HP Enterprise Services · Córdoba, Argentina
Jun 2009 - Oct 2010 · 1 year 3 months

<p>Maintained a customer offers web service for a leading Spanish bank</p><p> Awarded HP e-Award for outstanding contribution</p>

Certifications

Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 8 Programmer

oracle · Las Rozas de Madrid , Madrid , Spain · 2019

Skills

Java Kotlin Scala Spring Boot Spring WebFlux Python Microservices Reactive Programming Functional Programming VAVR REST APIs Distributed Systems Kubernetes Docker Istio Azure Azure DevOps Azure Pipelines Apache Kafka PostgreSQL MySQL Oracle DB Elasticsearch Redis Test Automation Mutation Testing PiTest Testcontainers Cucumber JUnit TestNG Selenium Technical Leadership Team Management Scrum Master Mentoring Technical Interviewing Security Champion OpenAI Codex coding agents agent orchestration Model Context Protocol (MCP) automated code review testing debugging technical investigation documentation WebFlux Jenkins AngularJS
Report this Profile?