Cristian López Fernández

Educate, enable and empower everyone to invest.

As Director of Engineering at Baraka, I lead a high-performing team while reporting directly to the founding team (CEO and CTO).

I drive innovation and develop solutions that optimize performance, scalability, and security. I work with cross-functional teams to align technology strategies with business goals and foster a collaborative and innovative culture.

My main focus is developing robust and scalable systems and using my expertise to design high-availability and low-latency infrastructure. Leverage best practices such as continuous integration, automated testing, and agile methodologies to streamline our development process and reduce time to market.

I recruit and support top engineering talent and encourage their growth through mentoring and training programs. I foster a culture of knowledge sharing and encourage staying up to date with industry trends.

I work closely with the ExCo team and contribute to revenue generation. By providing technical insight and support, we effectively position our products, understand customer needs, and develop revenue-centric capabilities that drive customer acquisition and retention.

Banking As A Platform

Leading the engineering lending platform team of Wio bank

This was a completely new project that I started from scratch. Defining the MVP scope and platform architecture in close collaboration with the main stakeholders.

I was primarily responsible for:

• Hiring the team (Back‑end, Front‑end, DevOps, and QA)
• Defining internal processes
• Designing the system architecture
• Managing partnerships

Tech stack: Spring Boot, Java 17, Azure, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, among other technologies.

The credit card, reinvented. A Fintech bringing financial wellness to customers.

I was promoted to Lead position. Key responsabilities about this role are:

• Managing engineering team
• Design scalable, reliable and secure architecture solutions
• To be involved with stakeholders and product in the company roadmap decisioning
• Continue contributing to product with customer features implementation

Tech stack: Quarkus, Java 11+, JUnit, Micronaut, Kotlin, Grails, Groovy, Spock, AWS (SQS, SNS, RDS, EC2, SES, CloudWatch, API Gateway), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Kibana, Grafana, Prometheus.

Employee no. 1

I started the project from scratch. At the very beginning, in order to get an early MVP, we built a monolith system based on Grails and Groovy. After 1 year and due to the growth of the company, we started migrating our monolith architecture to microservices architecture using Quarkus and Java. The main reasons for that were scalability, continuous integration and understanding of the domain model of the business.

I have been involved in the whole business growth process of the company, taking decisions with stakeholders and contributing with new features for product area.

As part of the team’s growth, I have been mentoring all of them, giving support and helping in the onboarding task.

Some of the customer features I have implemented at Tymit:

• Wallets integration (Apple Pay & Google Pay)
• Open Banking: Payment Initiation Services (PIS) & Account Information Services (AIS)
• Direct Debit
• Real time authorizations / transactions / payments, 3D Secure
• KYC

Tech stack: Quarkus, Java 11+, JUnit, Micronaut, Kotlin, Grails, Groovy, Spock, AWS (SQS, SNS, RDS, EC2, SES, CloudWatch, API Gateway), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, Kibana, Grafana, Prometheus.

“A man's college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.” - Henry Ford

Associate Lecturer in the Department of Computing Science, Computer Architecture, Programming Languages and Systems and Statistics and Operative Investigation.

I was in charge of the following subjects:

• High Performance Computing
• Distributed systems
• Development of applications for mobile devices

A wholly owned subsidiary of the Spanish Santander Group

Participating in several projects from a R&D department.

• Implementing Blockchain solution for internal project
• Leading OCR project for Identity document verification

Tech stack: Java 11, Kotlin, Apache Kafka, Corda, Tesseract, Spring Boot, JUnit, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker.

Information Technology & Services

As it is a consulting company, I was participating in several projects from different companies like BBVA, Orange, Telefónica, Sanitas, HM Hospitales, among others.

Although I participated as individual contributor most of the time, I had the opportunity of leading some teams (5-6 people) as Team lead using agile methodologies, supporting them on the technical area, contributing on technical design sessions, etc.

Tech stack: Java 11, Java 8, PHP, Python, Spring Boot, JUnit, Django, Liferay, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB.

Global Telecommunications Operator

• Participating in the development of Android & iOS applications
• Implementing Audio-Visual streaming project

Tech stack: Java, Android SDK, Objective-C, Spring Boot, JUnit, PHP, MySQL.

Master’s Thesis: SmartARGlass - Augmented Reality on smart devices

End-of-Degree project: RPiDomotic - Domotic system using Raspberry Pi