2019-2020
Senior Systems Architect - FinTech SME
Cloudera
I served as Senior Systems Architect in Professional Services, specializing in Financial Technologies. Delivered high-volume, real-time data solutions at massive scale - billions of streams, petabytes of data - for large enterprises and financial institutions.
Highlights
- Open Source Software advisory for enterprise adoption
- Large scale streams processing for mission-critical systems
- Subject Matter Expert FinTech specialist in open-source ecosystem
- Enterprise reference architectures advisor for distributed data platforms
I joined Cloudera in early 2019 as a Senior Systems Architect within the Professional Services division, bringing with me five years of hands-on engineering leadership at a European challenger bank that had built its entire technical foundation on open-source software and the Hortonworks/Cloudera ecosystem.
From Customer to Advisor
My transition to Professional Services was deliberate. Having spent years on the customer side—architecting large-scale distributed systems, managing complex data pipelines, and navigating the challenges of operationalizing big data in a regulated financial environment—I understood precisely what enterprises struggled with when adopting open-source data technologies. My attention to detail, obsession with customer success, and background in engineering consulting made me a natural fit for the PS team. I was assigned to billable client engagements by day three.
Client Work & Real-World Impact
I spent the next thirteen months juggling multiple advisory engagements with some of Europe’s largest and most demanding financial institutions. Working with clients like FinanzInformatik, Banca Intesa, and RBS, I tackled some of the industry’s most complex data challenges. These were the kinds of problems that keep chief data officers awake at night.
The work spanned the full spectrum of financial data infrastructure: designing real-time transaction processing systems that could ingest and process millions of trades per second without dropping a single event; building high-performance reconciliation systems that could identify and flag discrepancies across petabytes of historical data; implementing large-scale analytics platforms that transformed raw transaction data into actionable business intelligence within minutes rather than days; and architecting real-time fraud detection systems that could identify suspicious patterns in payment streams in near real-time to prevent losses before they happened.
One engagement involved helping a major UK bank operationalize a high-frequency trading monitoring system that needed to ingest, analyze, and report on millions of trades per day while maintaining perfect audit trails for regulatory compliance. Another centered on designing a regulatory reporting platform that consolidated data from dozens of legacy systems and produced compliant reports at scale—reducing what previously took regulatory teams weeks to produce in a matter of hours. These weren’t theoretical exercises; they were live systems handling billions of pounds in daily transaction volume.
Knowledge Transfer & Team Building
While my primary role was client-facing advisory work, I recognized early that my value to Cloudera extended beyond individual engagements. As a senior team member and architect, I made it a priority to capture and share lessons learned across the Professional Services organization. I prepared detailed demonstrations and proof-of-concepts that showed the broader team how to approach similar problems. I became a go-to resource for complex FinTech architectures, and I was tasked with mentoring new hires coming into the UK Professional Services organization, helping them understand both the technical depth and the business context that made each engagement successful.
My involvement in the hiring process throughout my tenure at Cloudera was equally important. I conducted numerous technical interviews and was instrumental in shaping the caliber and profile of architects the company brought into the UK team. We needed people who could bridge the gap between cutting-edge open-source technologies and the real operational constraints of enterprise financial systems.
Why I Left
By early 2020, I had achieved what I set out to do at Cloudera—I’d built deep expertise in operationalizing distributed data systems in regulated financial environments, contributed meaningfully to the team’s growth and capability, and helped some of the world’s largest financial institutions harness the power of open-source data technologies.
But the experience crystallized what I truly wanted to do: build something from the ground up with complete ownership and direct connection to the product. As a consultant, I was solving other people’s problems with other people’s platforms. I wanted to build the platform itself. I wanted to make the architectural decisions from day one, understand every line of code, and own the complete journey from vision to production.
That desire led directly to the founding of PortIT in late 2019. The lessons I learned at Cloudera shaped everything we built. I understood what financial institutions actually need, which compromises and trade-offs matter in practice, and the power of clean, modular architectures built on open-source foundations. These insights became the architectural blueprint for PortIT.
