Feb 2022 - Sept 2024
PowerGen is a solar electricity and mini-grids company providing energy access to previously unelectrified communities. In my role as Director of Product I was responsible for managing a team of four software engineers and guiding the product’s development roadmap.
The software team delivers products mainly used internally in the business to facilitate customer management. The software is responsible for accepting payments from the customers and crediting them with power. This system functions across a number of countries and is integrated with various payment providers and smart metering platforms. As a financial processor the software must be very reliable and resilient to outages.
Working in this multinational company has exposed me to the challenges of collaborating across a number of different cultures and time-zones. This has re-emphasised for me the importance of creating reliable asynchronous processes for achieving effective remote work with distributed teams.
Feb 2013 - Aug 2021
Hyrax is a biotech SaaS company specialising in the development of highly accurate and sensitive algorithms for genetic analysis. My role at the time of founding the company was to develop web services that would make these scientific algorithms available to be used as online applications.
Our products had direct impact on patient outcomes, and as such there is not room for inaccuracy or unreliability in the software. My work here taught me extreme attention to detail. I also gained an ability to analyse enormous data sets with the input data reaching into the hundreds of GB’s.
The software I developed processed these large data sets in parallel. I developed an application on AWS that automatically scaled the infrastructure in response to demand. Providing each user with maximal performance while minimising the cost to the business.
University of Cape Town. 2010 - 2012
Thesis: “Investigation of the FRAME Algorithm for Statistical Modelling of Visual Textures”. Publication: “Fast Implementation of the FRAME Algorithm using a GPU Gibbs Sampler” at The Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA) 2011.
Additional courses: Short course in embedded systems, Centre for High Performance Computing. Introduction to GPU programming with CUDA, UCT Dept of Computer Science.
University of the Witwatersrand. 2006 - 2009
| Elixir | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
|---|---|
| HTTP API’s | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| PostgreSQL | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Javascript | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| Golang | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| HTML and CSS | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| C#, C++, Python | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| Distributed systems | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
|---|---|
| Docker | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Bash | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Linux | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Networking | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| AWS | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| Azure | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| Azure Pipelines | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Git | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
I am passionate about knowledge management and distributed work practices. In both my roles I have pushed for the adoption of improved task and knowledge management. These have been successful initiatives, bringing order and process where there had previously been none.
I’m an empathetic person, and I believe this is a great strength to have as a manager. I ensure that I prioritise the well-being of my team.
I have the ability to see the big picture and to consider multiple viewpoints. This has been valuable in both my previous role in Product Management and when designing systems as a senior developer.