Codemotion Madrid 2026 is fine-tuning every detail to welcome a new edition packed with knowledge, business opportunities, and networking. Among the wide range of topics ahead, DevOps will play a key role at a time when, although everything moves at breakneck speed, security and stability remain non-negotiable.
In the talk “If Hope is Your Strategy, You’re Doing On-Call Wrong”, Sérgio Amorim, Lead Software Engineer & DevOps Platform at Revolut, will explain how they’ve built a world-class culture where proactive monitoring identifies threats before they ever reach the user.
You’ll discover how to manage high-pressure incidents with elite precision and build resilient systems that thrive under the weight of 50 million users.
Talk context
3 AM, Madrid. The harshest cold of winter bites without mercy. An engineer is on call in the comfort of their warm home, expecting—like most nights—that nothing will happen. And yet, on that one day we all hope never comes, it arrives without warning. A P0 alert lights up the phone screen with a chill no thermometer could measure. Fear.
Though it may sound somewhat Hollywood-esque, this scenario is not far from reality. Engineering teams operating at global scale live daily with the silent pressure of keeping critical systems running, knowing that millions of people rely on them to manage their information—or even more importantly, their money.
And if there’s one sector where all of this becomes especially critical, it’s finance. Here, there is no room for error. No room for improvisation—let alone hope. And yet, many platforms are still built on a fragile layer of blind trust and reactive patching, hoping nothing fails at the worst possible moment.
At the scale and speed at which major players operate today, this approach simply doesn’t provide the confidence and guarantees that users demand—or that engineering teams themselves deserve.
Reactivo -> Proactivo -> Paz mental
With the goal of letting those responsible for keeping infrastructure running finally rest—and sleep soundly—more and more companies are embracing a shift in mindset: moving from firefighting to fire prevention.
Proactive monitoring, well-defined runbooks, and intelligent alerting systems are no longer a luxury; they’ve become the only responsible way to operate when the volume of users, transactions, and critical dependencies leaves no room for ambiguity.
Over the years, it has become clear that the only way to reach this kind of operational nirvana is by designing infrastructures capable of anticipating failure before it happens, absorbing pressure without breaking, and recovering on their own.
Infrastructures that don’t rely on luck, but on engineering, discipline, and operational intelligence. Systems built from the ground up to fail gracefully, scale without drama, and alert with enough precision that no engineer has to guess what’s happening at 3 AM.
The talk
That is exactly the model that Sérgio Amorim helped build and scale at Revolut, one of the most demanding and fastest-growing fintech companies in the world.
From his position as Lead Software Engineer & DevOps Platform, Sérgio was actively involved in the transformation of a platform that today serves more than 70 million users worldwide, evolving its on-call practices from reactivity toward an operations culture where alerts arrive before failures occur.
In the talk “If Hope is Your Strategy, You’re Doing On-Call Wrong,” he revealed the frameworks they used to manage a global financial technology powerhouse with “zero stress.” Attendees were invited to learn how to shift from a “build and hope” mindset to one of full accountability and operational excellence.
The speaker: Sérgio Amorim, Lead Software Engineer & DevOps Platform at Revolut.
A software engineer with 20 years of experience in the information technology industry, he currently leads the Developer Experience and DevOps Platform Observability teams at Revolut. He is guided by the principle of making life easier for his customers, both internal and external, so they can achieve extraordinary things. At Revolut, this means creating a seamless and efficient workflow that enables engineers to build and manage their products effectively.
