Mikhail Stepanov
I design and evolve large-scale, distributed backend systems — trading platforms, payment gateways, and high-throughput integrations — for FinTech companies that can't afford to get scalability or reliability wrong.
Limassol, Cyprus
15+ years in FinTech engineering
I design and evolve large-scale, distributed backend systems — trading platforms, payment gateways, and high-throughput integrations — with a focus on scalability, resilience, and operational excellence. I've operated at org scale throughout my career: setting technical direction, influencing cross-team decisions, and aligning long-term architecture with business outcomes.
I'm equally at home deep in system architecture and in the cultural work that makes engineering organisations excellent: CI/CD automation, developer productivity tooling, and AI-assisted workflows.
Technical expertise
Where I can help
From a one-off audit to owning the architecture end-to-end.
Systems & Process Audits
Audit existing IT systems and development workflows, delivering a clear report and an action plan to close the gaps.
AI-Driven Engineering & Modernisation
Embed AI into the SDLC to automate routine engineering work, and lead the transformation of legacy systems into modern, maintainable platforms.
Architecture & Platform Design
Design systems across the full complexity spectrum — DDD, event-driven, modular monolith, or microservices — and plan entire brokerage solutions: trading platforms, CRM, integrations, KYC automation, risk management, reporting, and security.
Infrastructure & Delivery
Provision cloud (AWS) and bare-metal infrastructure as code, and improve CI/CD pipelines for faster, safer releases.
Observability & Code Quality
Improve observability, metrics, tracing, and analysis, alongside code quality, static analysis, linting, and security scanning.
Incident Response & Mentoring
Lead incident response and postmortems that turn failures into action, and mentor software and DevOps engineers to raise the bar.
Selected work
Real projects, real numbers — pulled straight from my track record.
Pepperstone — TradingView & Trading Platform Integration
Context: A growing trading platform needed real-time market integrations at high, sustained throughput.
Action: Designed and architected a TradingView integration (~200K RPS) and a connector to the trading platform (~100K RPS), leading a cross-functional team of backend, frontend, QA, and BI engineers.
Result: Reliable high-throughput integrations running in production, with faster and more flexible per-service deployments.
Pepperstone — Monolith to Microservices
Context: A legacy PHP monolith was limiting scalability and release velocity.
Action: Led solution design and implementation of the transition to microservices with event-driven architecture and microfrontends, alongside AWS infrastructure managed via Terraform.
Result: A modernised platform architecture enabling independent, lower-risk deployments across teams.
Unipesa — High-Load SMS Gateway
Context: A payment platform needed a scalable SMS gateway across multiple African telecom networks.
Action: Architected and implemented a high-load SMS Gateway (~50K RPS) integrated with 6 major African telecom providers, with audited CI/CD pipelines for the payment gateway.
Result: Zero-downtime deployment workflows and a robust, production-grade delivery pipeline.
FxPro — Microservices Migration & Team Leadership
Context: A legacy PHP monolith constrained the product roadmap and delivery pace.
Action: Built and led a team of five senior backend engineers; strategised and led the transition from the PHP monolith to Node.js/Python microservices.
Result: Smooth, well-aligned execution of the migration across developer and stakeholder objectives.
Let's connect
Whether you have a project in mind, a technical challenge to solve, or just want to talk distributed systems — my inbox is open.