Aitor Ruiz Fajardo

I am a people-first, hands-on Engineering Manager and Principal Architect. I grew from a Java backend engineer into the person who hires, coaches, sets technical direction, and still reviews and ships code. For the last four years I have been Head of Development at a regulated SaaS company in Ireland: founding engineer, then the leader of a fully remote, six-nationality department (backend, frontend, QA, UX, infrastructure).

I built that team from 1 to 16 (about 12 hires, three internal re-skillings, three technical leads promoted) and kept the core people and the release cadence through an acquisition and two rightsizings down to eight. Together with an AI-assisted operating model — Copilot, spec-driven agent workflows, and human-gated PR review — those eight engineers sustained the output of the former sixteen-person team. I own hiring, 1:1s, career ladders, the 12–15 month technical roadmap, and I am the customer-facing technical contact for enterprise clients (presales, SSO/identity, architecture reviews, audits).

On the technical side I led the move from a modular monolith to 17 event-driven microservices on Java / Spring Boot, Kafka and Kubernetes, with GitOps, multi-tenant isolation and enterprise SSO (Okta / Entra ID). We shipped five production applications at 2–3 validated releases a year, ran 99.9–99.99% availability SLAs, and passed nine ISO 27001/9001 audits plus three client supplier audits with zero major non-conformances. I also led a Cucumber/Allure BDD framework that cut validation effort per release from about 200 hours to 80, and stepped in as engineering Product Owner to take a client product from MVP in 6 months to production in 10.

Earlier I led a remote team delivering a bank risk application from POC to production quality for a top-15 global bank, rebuilt persistence on an asset-liability management platform, co-built an MVNO backend that reached 300k+ customers, and led three monolith-to-microservices migrations (telecom, logistics, SaaS). I had a short spell at a voice-AI startup on an on-device prototype (Kotlin, Java, C++, Python) — useful context, not my main story.

I am looking for Hands-on Engineering Manager, Technical Engineering Manager, or Principal Architect roles in remote-first (or flexible hybrid) companies: Series A–C startups and high-growth scale-ups in fintech, developer tooling, AI-enabled products, or other complex B2B SaaS. I want to stay close to the team and the architecture — not a pure people-ops manager, and not an architect who only writes decks. EU citizen, resident in Ireland, available from 1 October 2026.