Engineering leader. Cloud architect. Banking technologist. Twenty years of building and breaking large-scale systems at AWS, ABSA, Barclays Capital, and Capitec Bank. The scar tissue is the credential.
I'm the Group CIO at Capitec Bank, one of South Africa's largest retail banks, serving over 22 million digital clients. Before Capitec I was CTO at ABSA Group, Director of Engineering EC2 at Amazon Web Services, and built algorithmic trading infrastructure at Barclays Capital.
Through CloudScale Consulting I work with engineering teams on the problems that actually break things at scale, rearchitecting legacy platforms, securing cloud infrastructure, and fixing what failed cloud migrations leave behind.
This blog is where I write what I actually think. Opinionated, technical, and occasionally uncomfortable for people who prefer consensus over correctness.
Through CloudScale Consulting I work with engineering teams on the problems that actually break things, AWS architecture, cybersecurity & Zero Trust, platform rearchitecting, database design, AI integration, and network infrastructure. Solutions grounded in real operational experience at scale, not theoretical best practices.
Backed by engineering leadership at AWS, Capitec Bank, and ABSA Group. A small number of engagements taken each year.
I build and maintain five open source WordPress plugins covering backup & restore, database cleanup, cybersecurity tooling, SEO optimization, and marketing analytics. All production-tested on real sites.