Experience

Timeline

1. Feb 2024 – present

   Cape Town

   Current

   ixo DevOps Engineer

   I worked here half-time for over a year while full-time at BM Technologies, and full-time since March 2025.

   • Built a config-driven, multi-cloud Terraform platform (Vultr / AWS / GCP) that any team can plug their own environments into, and wrote the onboarding docs.
   • Cut backup storage costs 60–80% with GCS lifecycle policies; ran cost comparisons showing 28–36% savings going multi-cloud vs. AWS-only.
   • Own uptime and monitoring (Uptime Kuma, Grafana alerting) and lead incident response for the platform.

   Full details +4

   • Set up GitOps with ArgoCD, including an image-updater for automated image tracking and rollout.
   • Moved secrets management to External Secrets Operator + Vault, with Dex handling OIDC auth.
   • Built and locked down Cloudflare tunnels for secure DB/service access, with no public exposure needed.
   • Run infra for Web3 workloads: cross-chain validator nodes (Hyperlane), RPC/IPFS endpoints.

2. Jun 2023 – Mar 2025

   Pennsylvania, US · Remote

   BM Technologies (BMTX) Software Engineer

   Formerly BankMobile. A full-time role, running alongside my first year at ixo.

   • Designed and built a partner-facing identity verification platform from scratch: a gRPC service pair (public gateway + domain engine) productising KYC/IDV for university partners. Dominant contributor on both from day one.
   • Built a bulk verification pipeline processing PGP-encrypted student cohort files from Azure Blob Storage with Spring Batch: per-school routing, result generation, failure quarantine.
   • Integrated end-to-end into Azure (App Configuration, Key Vault, Service Bus, Functions, AKS) and hardened it for production: Redis caching, rate limiting, health checks.

   Full details +1

   • Implemented the decision layer over Socure: reason-code retrieval and translation, score-based filtering producing accept/review/reject outcomes.

3. Feb 2020 – Jun 2023

   Cape Town

   envel Software Engineer

   As costs ramped up, I taught myself Terraform and infra work from scratch and built out the company's entire cloud infrastructure. That self-taught DevOps skill set is what made me ixo's sole platform hire.

   • Primary engineer on the core banking API: a Kotlin/Spring GraphQL monolith covering accounts, envelopes, transactions, cards, transfers and onboarding.
   • Led the backend migration between core banking providers (Q2 → Helix/CorePro): new client library, shared processor framework, and the event-driven workers that moved deposits, withdrawals and statements onto the new core.
   • Wrote a zero-downtime migration restructuring every live user's envelope data for a new budgeting model: no lost funds, per-user failure isolation, safe re-runs.

   Full details +1

   • Built the identity, fraud and AML stack (Jumio, Socure, Castle, Unit21) and delivered the fractional-share investing integration (DriveWealth) end to end.

4. Feb 2019 – Feb 2020

   Cape Town

   Absa Group Java Developer (internship)

   A shadow-style internship on an enterprise Java codebase: unit tests, small bug fixes, and my first look at how a large bank ships code. I was offered a permanent seat, and chose envel for the steeper learning curve.

5. Aug 2018 – Feb 2020

   Cape Town

   Younglings Learnership

   A stipend-funded, self-study learnership in Spring Framework, RESTful services, SQL/NoSQL and reactive programming. It led me to the Absa internship, and from there to the offer at envel.