Amsterdam · Netherlandsstaff engineer · trading systems
Oleg Lobanov
Staff Engineer @ Bitvavo — ultra-low-latency, high-throughput trading systems
I make trading systems fast — and keep them fast when it matters most.
p99 order latency — legacy stack vs today's exchangelive
legacy stack (2018)today's exchange
Log scale, 1 µs – 1 s. The green line is the point: a flat 5 µs p99 through every volatility burst — risk check, matching, and settlement included. The red line is what it replaced.
About
At Bitvavo, one of Europe's largest regulated crypto exchanges, I led the transition from a 2018-era legacy stack to a deterministic exchange core that risk-checks, matches, and settles an order in a flat 5 microseconds at p99, down from a load-dependent 60–300 ms. Latency that used to spike with market volatility is now a constant.
I joined the exchange core as one of its two engineers and helped grow the team to 36. Along the way I stabilized the legacy platform from near-daily incidents to near zero, introduced the Aeron-based replicated-state-machine foundation the new core runs on, and most recently led the FIX gateway that opened Bitvavo to institutional trading.
Before Bitvavo: 15+ years of high-load distributed systems — OTT streaming as a co-founder and CEO, microservices at Lazada serving hundreds of thousands of requests per second, multi-tenant ad serving at eBay, real-time analytics for Shell's crude oil traders, and a Rails-to-Go migration at Deliveroo that saved $1.2M a year.
Experience
Apr 2024 — now Amsterdam
Staff Engineer · Bitvavo
Led the exchange transition from the legacy 2018-era stack to a new deterministic core: a replicated state machine over Aeron (reliable UDP), processing the full order path — risk check, matching, and settlement — in a flat 5 µs at p99. Legacy latency degraded to 200–300 ms during peak trading; the new core holds 5 µs regardless of load.
Led the design and implementation of the FIX gateway, bringing institutional-grade connectivity to the exchange — a maturity milestone opening the platform to market makers and institutional flow.
Engineered determinism as a feature: every state transition is replayable byte-for-byte, turning debugging, testing, and regulatory audit into replay instead of forensics — part of the engineering foundation behind Bitvavo's MiCA license.
Helped grow the exchange core team from 2 engineers to 36, scaling the organization alongside the system.
Sep 2022 — Apr 2024 Amsterdam
Senior Software Engineer · Bitvavo
Pioneered Bitvavo's adoption of the in-memory replicated state machine pattern over reliable UDP, introducing Aeron and leading the first integrations — the architectural foundation of the deterministic exchange core.
Led the unification of user balance operations — previously executed in parallel by multiple domains — into a single deterministic source of truth for every balance mutation.
Dramatically improved platform stability: from near-daily incidents under peak bull-run load to near zero.
Transformed the exchange from an unstructured legacy codebase into a structured, documented system with solid test coverage — within months of joining.
Standardized development processes and coding practices across the company.
Mar 2021 — Sep 2022 Amsterdam
Senior Software Engineer · Deliveroo
Migrated core backend services from the Ruby on Rails monolith to Go, owning the core API platform and ordering flows.
Improved latency and throughput across these services, cutting infrastructure costs by $1.2M/year.
Jun 2019 — Mar 2021 Rotterdam
Senior Software Engineer · Shell
One of the first engineers in Shell's Agile Hub: helped build the backend engineering team and establish its development culture and processes.
Built an analytics platform used by crude oil traders for trading decisions, replacing and automating legacy systems.
Re-architected it from pre-calculated charts to real-time computation: traders explore any combination of inputs and see results instantly — compute and wait times cut from hours to milliseconds.
Mar 2018 — Jun 2019 Amsterdam
Senior Software Engineer · eBay
Developed and maintained a high-load, distributed ad-serving system (iCAS), multi-tenant by design, powering market-leading classifieds platforms — marktplaats.nl, 2dehands.be, kijiji.ca, and more.
Built its next-generation core: replaced the traditional MySQL-based ads storage with a fast in-memory deterministic state machine, with Kafka as the source of all incoming and outgoing events.
Go and Java on Elasticsearch, Kafka, Hadoop, Consul, Nomad, and Docker.
May 2017 — Apr 2018 Moscow
Team Lead · Lazada Group
Promoted to Team Lead within 8 months of joining. Led the team behind Lazada's high-throughput microservices: feature design and planning, delivery, and team development.
Oct 2016 — May 2017 Moscow
Senior Software Engineer · Lazada Group
Designed and developed distributed, highly available microservices processing hundreds of thousands of requests per second for millions of customers of Southeast Asia's leading e-commerce platform.
Go and Kubernetes (an early production adopter, 2016) on Docker, MySQL, RabbitMQ, etcd, and Aerospike.
Jun 2013 — Dec 2016 Baku
CEO & Co-Founder · MBSys
Co-founded and led an OTT/IPTV company, building the full stack: a head station based on our own software/hardware solution, distributed transcoding and streaming systems, and an Android-based set-top-box client.
Java, Kotlin, and Go on MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, Consul, and ffmpeg.
Dec 2010 — Jun 2013 Azerbaijan
Lead Software Engineer · Mobile Broadcasting Systems
Designed the system architecture of a broadcasting platform streaming satellite TV channels over the internet to web, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Nokia devices, while leading the engineering team day to day.
2009 — Dec 2010 Azerbaijan
Web Developer · SAFAROFF
Built a variety of web projects with PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Nginx, Redis, and Memcached.
Talks
Jun 2026From a startup stack to 5 microseconds Devoxx Poland · Kraków