Jaco Nel Email & Phone Number

Cape Town, Western Cape, Za

Cape Town, Western Cape, Za

Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, My

Leading a team of engineers responsible for building and maintaining the payment and subscription infrastructure in a multi-cultural and multi-regional company. I am responsible for building an autonomous, agile, team. This includes hiring, mentoring, conflict resolution, providing strategic and technical direction. I worked directly with the product owner to ensure the priorities match the company’s strategic direction and growth objectives. During a very difficult time in the Cape Town office, I managed to not only retain my team but also grow the team. During this period, I relocated the team to new office space, managed to resolve continuous payroll issues and reworked the hiring process to ensure only quality engineers were hired.

Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur, My

I was part of the engineering team that looked after all things payments at iflix. We enabled users from various emerging markets to pay for iflix using their preferred payment method.We looked after the central subscription-management and order-placement systems, regularly adding new payment-integrations and extending functionality within our external-billers framework to provide new users with payment mechanisms.Our systems have been built as cloud native solutions, making use of Amazon AWS services where possible. Systems were stateless and made heavy use of an event-driven design. These systems spanned both serverless and containerized solutions and were deployed to AWS Lambda and Kubernetes, respectively.The systems had to be scalable considering iflix's goal considering iflix's large user base and rapid expansion, and served millions of requests per hour.One of my first projects in this team was to migrate approximately 11 million users from 3 separate legacy systems into our new wallet platform without any downtime. We succeeded in completing this migration in just a few months, successfully migrating users from multiple regions with many payment mechanisms.Keywords:- AWS (SNS, SQS, DDB, Kinesis, RDS, Cloudformation, S3, API Gateway, Lambda, CloudWatch, etc)- Microservices- Nodejs- PostgreSQL- DynamoDB- Serverless- Kubernetes- Event sourcing

Lagos, Ng

I lead a multicultural, multi-regional team consisting of 5 architects. I managed the execution and measurement of work and provided the team with technical direction. I reported directly to the CTO of the company. I was responsible for mentoring and upskilling not only our software architects but also our software engineers. I was tasked with breaking down an ivory tower structure and destroying any silos that existed between the architects and engineers. By doing this I improved the overall quality of the system, increased the general skill level in the department and promoted transparency and ownership.I assisted in converting our single tenanted systems to multi-tenanted state in order to introduce a secondary store; daily.konga.com. This store was an attempt at selling grocery items online in Nigeria.Assisted with the design and development of supporting warehouse systems to improve the efficiency of inbounding, outbounding and managing stock and inventory in the warehouse. This allowed us to open up the platform for use by 3rd party merchants.Assisted in the design and implementation of a scalable product catalog, search engine, and autosuggest to name a few.

Lagos, Ng

As a software architect, I was given more responsibility for the larger picture. I focused on the design (and development) of service-oriented systems in a complex business domain. I worked directly with Product Owners to define the business needs and translated them into a technical solution that would fit into the overall ecosystem. A lot of emphasizing and focus is applied in attempting to decompose and decouple a set of legacy monolithic systems.I designed and implemented a recommendations systems based on open source technologies saving the company hundreds of thousands on licensing fees. I designed and implemented an gateway solution for the unreliable conditions we faced in the emerging market we were operating in. The system was based on Facebook's GraphQL protocol and acted as an aggregation layer for client applications and systems. It significantly reduced the number of calls and size of responses returned the the clients. This significantly improved the user experience of our mobile and progressive web app clients. This project made it possible for our progressive web app to be featured in Google's Progressive Web App Summit in 2016.Assisted in converting our single tenanted systems to multi-tenanted state in order to introduce a secondary store; daily.konga.com.Assisted with the design and development of supporting warehouse systems, product catalog, search engine, autosuggest to name a few.

Lagos, Ng

I joined as a Software Engineer in the Service Oriented Architecture team. We were tasked with breaking up our Monolithic e-commerce platform, based on Magento, into smaller micro-services hosted in the cloud.As part of the SOA team, I helped establish proper coding standards and refined the code review process. I assisted with the setting up support systems to improve the code quality and developed libraries to aid in the shift to a microservice architecture. I helped in successfully extracting the product catalog, stock management, recommendation, wishlist, autosuggestion and many more.I often found myself moving between DevOps, development and software architecture.Help drive the implementation of Docker containers for standardization of the development environment, allowing developers to easily get started on new projects and providing a consistent development environment.Keywords:- AWS (Opsworks, EC2, S3, RDS, ElastiCache, etc)- Nodejs- Elasticsearch- PredictionIO- Docker- Kubernetes- Redis- Chef- Terraform

Century City, Western Cape, Za

At Rightshift we applied gamification to online slot machines. I formed part of the core team responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining a set of microservices that would gamify existing slot machine games. These services were developed in Java with a NoSQL database for persistence. The systems were designed to be multi-tenanted, thus allowing us to easily integrate multiple clients onto the platform.We added concepts like achievements, rewards, and leaderboards to slot games to increase engagement thus increase business revenue.We followed a service-oriented architecture. Implemented event-driven architectures where it made sense. We automated infrastructure provision using Ansible and VMWare.We made heavy use of AMQP for communication between various systems.During my employment at Rightshift, Rightshift was acquired by Derivco. Derivco is a large player in the online gaming industry with a global presence. After being acquired by Derivco, I was selected to be part of a small team who did research and development for the implementation of their central event bus using RabbitMQ. Keywords:- Java (Spring Framework)- Couchbase- MySQL- Maven- Artifactory- Python (Scripting and task automation only)- Ansible- Git (using GitLab for hosting and review)- Played around with Docker, CoreOS- RabbitMQ- JWT

Cape Town, Cape, Za

As a software engineer at South Africa’s largest e-commerce site, I maintained, scaled and extended the Takealot website and back-office systems.We were focussed on porting the codebase to separate, python based, restful services while maintaining the e-commerce platform and delivering new business features.One of my first projects at Takealot was a rules engine to help capitalize on shipping costs. I worked on the first iteration of the daily deals engine. A platform that would, later on, drive a great number of sales during the Black Friday Sale. We started the migration of Takealot services into the cloud; primarily making use of AWS EC2 servers. We started on the automation of the infrastructure for the development environment using a combination of vagrant and Chef recipes.Keywords:- Python- SOA- HTML, CSS and Javascript- MongoDB (replication cluster)- MySQL (master-slave replication)- Fabric (automated deployment)- Chef (infrastructure provisioning).- Git- Linux- Solr- ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) for centralized logging- Supervisor- Apache- Nginx- Varnish- Memcache- AMQP

Sutton, Surrey, Gb

At Ambition24Hours I lead a team responsible for system architecture and tooling. We were responsible for researching and implementing scalable and high-performance solutions to solve various business and technology problems. We implemented infrastructure automation, automated deployments, and implemented standards and processes to increase the code quality, release frequency and innovation. We developed frameworks and tools to increase the speed at which we could deliver new service, thus increasing the speed at which we could deliver business value.Keywords: - PHP (OOP, MVC) - Service Oriented Architecture - HTML, CSS and Javascript - GWT - Java - MongoDB (replication cluster) - MySQL (master-slave replication) - Capistrano for automated deployment - Chef for infrastructure deployment - Git - Linux - Unit Testing - Continous Integration

Brackenfell, Cape Town, Za

After initially being hired as a software engineer, I was promoted to Development Project Manager.During my time at Liquid Edge, I gained extensive knowledge and experience in client interaction and had the honor to work with representatives from large companies like PSG, Alan Gray, and SARPA.I was involved in many short to mid-term projects and was in charge of the delivery of these projects. Roles and Responsibilities: - Consulting and advising clients. - Gather project requirements - Estimating project costs - Project Analysis and compiling of technical requirements. - System and database design. - UML (use case diagrams, Flow charts, ERD, etc). - Managing of the development team. - Managing of development projects within budget and timeline. - Development, maintenance and bug fixing on/for existing projects - Research on new technologies and processes. - Code Review - Establishing and enforcing proper coding standards and techniques - MentoringKeywords: - PHP (OOP and MVC) - HTML/CSS - Javascript with jQuery - MySQL - Svn - Linux

Sutton, Surrey, Gb

I formed part of a team that developed an in-house medical recruitment platform. The team followed an agile methodology and was lead directly by the Software Development Manager.We designed and developed a client facing portal that allowed GPs, nurses, and locums from multiple regions to manage their availability, personal details, professional documents, compliance status and much more. We designed and developed internal systems that would assist call center staff to better manage clients, shifts, compliance, and auditing. Allowing the business to grow to multiple regions.The system was designed and implemented using service-oriented architecture, continuous integration, and a peer review process.Roles and Responsibilities: - Design, development, and maintenance of new and existing services. - Assisted in maintaining servers and infrastructure. - Mentoring and training of fellow engineers. - Code review and implementation of coding standards.Keywords:- PHP (OOP, MVC)- Service Oriented Architecture- Flex / Actionscript- MySQL (in master-slave replication set)- Svn- Linux- Continuous Integration