Jaco Botha Email & Phone Number

Utrecht, Netherlands

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

In my current role as Technical Director at Backbase, I focus on solving complex technical challenges, ensuring the scalability and robustness of our enterprise banking platform. My primary responsibilities include hands-on technical problem-solving, backend system architecture, and optimizing the platform for performance and security. I actively contribute to the design and implementation of cloud-native, distributed systems while continuously honing my expertise in Java, Spring, and Kubernetes.I take the lead role in shaping our company wide engineering principles and driving the strategic backend designs of our enterprise banking platform. I work closely with engineering teams to ensure our technical solutions are aligned with customer needs. I lead a group of 9 talented lead principal engineers, who in turn oversee the larger group of 40+ principal engineers.In collaboration with Engineering Directors, I ensure that the delivery of our product is consistent and of the highest quality. I prioritize technical excellence and development of an engineering culture that fosters growth, innovation in our teams.

Amsterdam Area

Lead Principal Software Engineer at Backbase, is a hands-on engineering role, consistently delivering production-ready code while tackling the most complex technical challenges within my value stream. I played a critical role in defining and executing our technical vision, ensuring that the product continually evolved to meet both business objectives and customer expectations.I ensured that our solutions were secure, extensible, maintainable, rigorously tested, high-performing, and accessible. I collaborated closely with several squads within the value stream to optimize processes, empowering engineers to enhance the quality of their work and driving the successful delivery of key initiatives. In addition to my value stream responsibilities, I contributed to strategic, platform-wide initiatives as part of the Backend Guild, working on projects that impacted the entire R&D department.

Amsterdam Area

As part of a major modernization initiative at Bank Mendes Gans, a subsidiary of ING Group founded in 1883, I played a key role in overhauling their legacy Netting product. This critical project involved a complete rebuild of the application, leveraging modern technologies such as Lit for frontend development and Spring Boot for backend services.In addition to the technical redevelopment, I took ownership of optimizing the CI/CD pipeline, automating workflows using Azure DevOps, and enabling seamless deployments on Kubernetes. These enhancements significantly improved the efficiency and scalability of the application, positioning the product for future growth and innovation.

Zeist, Utrecht, Netherlands

At Deloitte, I led the development of a highly complex, cloud-native digital lending platform for one of the Netherlands' leading banks. This was by far one of the most challenging but also the most rewarding projects of my career. With full autonomy over the technical approach, I designed and implemented a scalable event-driven architecture consisting of over 30 microservices. The platform handled real-time loan decisioning, integrating AI-driven credit risk assessments, and reduced the loan approval process to under 15 minutes.Initially starting with a small team of four engineers, the success of the platform enabled us to expand to four additional teams, all building on the foundation I had created. The architecture I developed was centered around seamless communication and reliability, leveraging Kafka for event streaming, AWS for infrastructure (including EKS and DocumentDB), and Spring Boot for microservices. Throughout the project, I maintained a hands-on role, contributing to the codebase, optimizing performance, and ensuring that the solution met the highest standards of scalability, security, and maintainability. The result was a robust, flexible platform that significantly improved loan processing speed and efficiency for the bank.

Utrecht, Netherlands

As an international software powerhouse with 37+ years of deep industry experience spanning the banking, education, finance, insurance, telecoms and public sectors we stand out from the crowd.As Co-Founder / Executive of the Netherlands hub BBD Software B.V., my fellow Co-Founders and I contribute to the leadership, strategy and decision making within the dutch entity and ensure alignment within the larger BBD group strategy.My role as an Executive is to grow and manage our technical and engineering competencies within the Netherlands. Ensuring the technical needs of BBD and our clients are sufficiently resourced and that the technical resources align with the needs of both BBD and our clients. My duties further include delivering on the ground engineering solutions for our European clients as Principal Engineer.

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

Backbase provides a modern software solution developed in a microservices architecture, ensuring financial institutions can build on top of cutting-edge technology. Our technology drives solutions in a variety of ways for customers, from cloud-native, globally scaled deployments to on-premise managed application servers, demanding smart thinking and innovative solutions.As part of Backbase technical leadership, I set an example of how to drive technology innovation and large initiatives. I take ownership of the technical designs, working closely with other architects to ensure company-wide alignment. I lead a tribe of three scrum teams, working with developers, testers and other team members to ensure the technical vision is known and followed during our development activities. People turn to me for advice based on my sound experience and deep technical understanding of software development, practices and frameworks.As the Development Systems Guild chair, I lead and facilitate discussions on topics such as; performance, high-availability, resiliency, zero-downtime deployments and production topologies across the entire organization.

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

As Technical Architect, it’s my job to ascertain that envisaged solutions become reality. Taking this client-facing role, I am equally comfortable in deep-dive technical workshops and in board-level presentations. Having earned my stripes in designing web-based architectures, I have no problem finding the scope in large-scale, complex projects.I know our projects are to be delivered according to design, time and budget, but I also know our engineers need their space to build the solutions I’ve defined. By creating structure and clear explanations, I provide guidance and oversight to my team.

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

As a Senior Java Consultant, I am part of the Professional Services (PS) team. PS is a team of highly motivated specialists with specific skills and experience required to make sure that the implementation of our product at our customer’s location goes ahead as smoothly as possible. Every project has its own set of unique challenges that must be overcome, and I must be able to think and react quickly to find a solution that works for everyone. As a PS consultant, I work closely with partners and customers all over the world and have the professional and personal skills required to develop, teach, support, and lead teams towards successfully delivering our enterprise solution and achieving their goals.

Pretoria Area, South Africa

As technical lead of Vodacom International which includes the online portals and mobile apps for DRC, Mozambique and Tanzania, I manage a team of eight developers and the delivery of our systems to the client. I assess the impact of proposed changes, do code reviews of peers and design and develop back end and front end solutions. As part of the team that was responsible for migrating the codebase to a new tool-set, I was involved in laying the groundwork, creating standards and implementing the new tools and technologies which includes: Maven project configuration and archetypes for generating project structures, creating Docker images for tools, configuring UrbanCode, TeamCity and Maven build and deployment processes, migrating code from ClearCase to Git, as well as implementing a complete Continuous Integration workflow.

Pretoria Area, South Africa

Vodacom is a fast-paced environment, unpredictable and deadline-driven. I was part of a 6 person team doing a complete rewrite of Vodacom Account Summary journey. My main responsibilities during the rewrite as Senior Java Developer was, to develop back end systems, manage requirements, track team progress and report to project manager. During the development process, we used SCRUM (agile software development methodology) to manage both the rewrite as well as our “business as usual” work items. The rewritten journey was developed using the following technologies: Java/JEE, EJB3, Jesry, REST, AngularJS and IBM Portal Server.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

The Vodacom Online Solution is developed in a Java/JEE environment with the back ends running on WebLogic application server and an IBM portal frontend (Portlets JSR 168). As a developer, I focused on “business as usual” work items such as change requests and bug fixes. During this time the main technologies I used were: Java/JEE, Weblogic Portal, ClearCase, EJB3, SOAP, JSP and JavaScript.

Gauteng, South Africa

Hired as a Senior Software Engineer / Technical Lead. During my time at BBD I was contracted out to Vodacom, working on various parts of their online customer portal.

Pretoria Area, South Africa

As System Specialist, I was responsible for a complete rewrite of their internal software called Business Link. During this time I worked under extremely tight deadlines, as this software was crucial to the business as usual processes. The system was developed using the following technologies: Java/JEE, PrototypeJS, SVN, Ant, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, MSSQL, and ran on Tomcat, and Glassfish application server.Personnel Identification Management System. In short, it verifies the credentials of a prospective employee. The application interfaces with multiple external services, to run criminal, fraud and credit checks, these services include Ideco, AFISwitch, TransUnion, FSB, etc. During this time I worked closely with the client (Nedbank), managing the requirements, design, development, delivery and support. The system was developed using the following technologies: Java/JEE, PrototypeJS, SVN, Ant, Tomcat, MySQL, MSSQL, SOAP, and Web Services, and ran on a WebSphere application server.

Johannesburg Area, South Africa

I was responsible for the creation and maintenance of their website. The website featured an online catalogue of all their products and services, manageable by the marketing team. Secondly, I created a document template engine, to automate the process of completing various legal documents. The system aggregated all the unique user inputs into one easy to use form, then generated all the pre-filled documents to be signed.

Bachelor'S Degree, Computer Systems

Higher National Diploma, Information Technology

Diploma, Information Technology