From AWS to Satispay: Scaling a system that helps people pay, save, and invest

May 12, 2026

We often hear about the "brain drain": talented engineers moving abroad to work for tech giants in cities like Dublin or Seattle. But what draws them back?

Meet Michele. After a decade at AWS in Ireland building and scaling CloudWatch, he decided to bring his expertise home. He joined Satispay as a Senior Staff Engineer to help tackle some of the most unique technical challenges in the European fintech space. Now that he’s hit the 90-day mark, we asked him about the move, the tech, and why he’s on a mission to help empower people through finance.

Coming home to Italy after ten years at AWS in Ireland was a huge life change. I spent a decade there building and scaling CloudWatch, and I truly loved that international and diverse environment. I was honestly a bit worried I wouldn’t find that same energy here.

But my worries disappeared quickly! We have a genuinely global team, with many colleagues who have experience abroad and an engineering team that thinks in a truly global way. Our CTO has a clear, ambitious direction for the engineering organisation, and we’re all moving toward the same vision.

We are building an independent payment network from scratch, which is a completely different technical challenge than building an app on top of existing banking rails. When you look at it from an availability and security standpoint, it’s a massive undertaking. That’s what convinced me this was the right move.

Honestly, no surprises, and that’s a win! The interview process was transparent. They were upfront about what was working and, more importantly, what was still broken or needed to be built. I knew exactly what I was walking into.

The stack is built on AWS with a microservices architecture the company has invested heavily in. Since I spent a decade at AWS, I felt at home immediately. What did stand out was the concentration of talent. Seeing this level of seniority and international experience in an Italian scale-up isn’t common.

We’re growing incredibly fast. My goal is to make sure we keep shipping features without losing the reliability our users trust. Right now, I’m helping improve our observability platform with a new APM.

My time at CloudWatch taught me that you cannot scale what you cannot measure. Before you can improve a system, you need to truly understand it: its bottlenecks, its anomalous behaviours, and the patterns hidden inside the noise. The APM we are introducing is exactly about giving the team the visibility they need to move fast without losing control.

I try to keep it simple. Every morning I ask myself: "How can I help our team the most right now?"

Even though there’s no fixed formula, I focus on what will bring the biggest impact. Sometimes that means writing a shared library that solves a recurring problem across multiple teams. Other times it is drafting an architectural document that helps the team make an important decision at scale. Asking the right questions and measuring the impact of what you do is essential. A Senior Staff Engineer is not there to do everything; they are there to do the things that actually move the needle.

We’re laying the foundation for tens of millions of future users. That’s a big responsibility! The choices we make today about our architecture will shape how Satispay works for years to come.

What excites me most is contributing to an engineering organisation that can grow in a sustainable way: processes, standards, and technical culture. We aren't just building systems to handle today's load; we're building a platform and a team ready to scale. When our observability is rock solid, we can build almost anything with total confidence.