Brandon Piner

Technical Team Lead | Principal Software Engineer | Backend Platforms, Python, Distributed Systems

Cape Town, South Africa
Birthdate: 25/02/1993 Email: brandon@openprocess.me
Phone: +27 ** ** **** LinkedIn: za.linkedin.com/in/brandonpiner1
Website: OpenProcess.me
Australian work rights: Requires employer sponsorship; preferred locations Melbourne or Sydney

Executive Profile

Technical leader and principal-level backend engineer with 15+ years of experience designing, modernising, and operating high-scale customer-facing platforms across enterprise, product, and startup environments. Combines hands-on expertise in Python, C#/.NET, distributed systems, real-time data, event-driven architecture, AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres, Terraform, security, and AI-enabled products with the leadership required to align teams around clear technical direction.

Known for taking ownership of ambiguous, high-impact problems and turning them into scalable, maintainable, secure, and production-ready systems. Brings a safe, pragmatic approach to architecture: balancing customer experience, performance, reliability, security, delivery timelines, infrastructure cost, and future adaptability.

Leadership Value

• Lead architecture and delivery across complex backend systems, reducing risk and management overhead.
• Build engineering capability through hiring, mentoring, standards, documentation, and practical technical direction.
• Translate business priorities into systems that are scalable, observable, secure, maintainable, and cost-conscious.
• Influence senior leadership and peer teams through design reviews, architecture recommendations, written standards, and technical presentations.
• Improve engineering operations through safer releases, continuous deployment, monitoring analysis, incident reduction, and high-availability practices.
• Balance quick delivery with long-term flexibility, as demonstrated through product development and greenfield architecture.

Selected Impact

• Scaled a customer-facing platform aggregating data from more than 100,000 hardware sensors, processing over 1 TB of data per day and supporting thousands of customers.
• Reduced large-customer load times from approximately 30 seconds to 2 seconds through a real-time state-management redesign.
• Reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 5% through architecture and deployment optimisation.
• Reduced average code-review turnaround from 2 days to the same day, enabling faster continuous deployment.
• Improved production stability from near-weekly serious outages to more than one year without a serious outage.
• Delivered a multi-region EU cluster involving the launch and individual configuration of 60 services within the allocated timeline.
• Built a Terraform-based regional deployment model that makes future expansion faster and more repeatable.
• Led architecture standards adopted across a 16-person backend organisation.
• Designed InboxForge from a blank page, using AI to customise email categorisation recommendations and suggestions while balancing cost, speed to market, scale, and adaptability.

Core Capabilities

Technical leadership and architecture

Architecture ownership, technical strategy, system design, design reviews, architecture documentation, engineering standards, technical discovery, project scoping, delivery planning, risk management, greenfield design, cross-team alignment.

Backend and distributed systems

Python, C#/.NET Core, Go, C++, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, microservices, distributed systems, real-time data processing, event-driven architecture, message buses, Kafka, CQRS, event sourcing, domain-driven design, APIs, gRPC, HTTP/REST, MQTT, Postgres, high-throughput networking.

Cloud, platform, and delivery

AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions/Workflows, Docker, CI/CD, continuous deployment, multi-region architecture, deployment automation, staging environments, infrastructure cost optimisation, snapshot backups, high availability.

Reliability and security

Monitoring and alert analysis, paging reduction, component monitoring standards, production readiness, incident prevention, alert and webhook architecture, failure analysis, idempotent event processing, at-least-once delivery, secure vault storage, PostgreSQL pgcrypto, OAuth, JWT authentication.

People and business leadership

Team leadership, hiring, mentoring, AI enablement, senior leadership presentations, stakeholder management, product partnership, cybersecurity collaboration, prioritisation, dependency management, scope control, remote-team collaboration.

Professional Experience

Director and Founder

OpenProcess | February 2026 - Present | Cape Town, South Africa

• Founded and operate a product company spanning AI software, workflow automation, connected hardware, and digital payments.
• Architected InboxForge from a blank page, balancing cost, speed to market, scalability, and flexibility to adapt as the product grows.
• Built AI-assisted email categorisation features that customise recommendations and provide suggestions for organising messages.
• Launched InboxForge as an AI-based email organisation product using categorisation and smart rules to reduce manual inbox management.
• Created VendingOS, a hardware and software platform that modernises legacy vending machines with internet connectivity and card-based and online payment capability.
• Own product direction, technical architecture, delivery priorities, commercial trade-offs, security decisions, and implementation across multiple product initiatives.

Technical Team Lead, Backend and Android

Aruba UXI, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company | March 2021 - Present

• Lead backend engineering across 3 backend teams, directly managing up to 6 developers and influencing a 16-person backend organisation.
• Set architecture direction for high-scale systems aggregating data from more than 100,000 hardware sensors, processing over 1 TB per day, and supporting thousands of customers.
• Designed and guided real-time systems that process incoming data to trigger state changes, notifications, and live dashboards for customer-facing functionality.
• Established architecture standards, rules, and usage guidance adopted across the backend teams through written technical documentation and shared design patterns.
• Spearheaded the redesign of a critical real-time state-management platform that was vertically constrained, difficult to maintain, and taking approximately 30 seconds to load for larger customers.
• Delivered a horizontally scalable replacement that reduced large-customer load times to approximately 2 seconds, improving responsiveness and removing a major customer-facing bottleneck.
• Simplified the system structure and established full test coverage, enabling more engineers to safely understand, modify, and extend the platform.
• Reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 5% through architecture and deployment optimisation while preserving scalability and production requirements.
• Introduced developer-cycle workflows that reduced average code-review turnaround from 2 days to the same day, increasing delivery throughput in a continuous-deployment environment.
• Improved test coverage through a separate engineering-quality initiative, strengthening confidence in ongoing changes and releases.
• Established a staging environment and stricter production-release controls, reducing serious outages from near-weekly occurrences to more than one year without a serious production outage.
• Drove paging reduction by analysing the most frequent alerts, distinguishing monitoring issues from underlying system faults, and directing the team toward the appropriate fix.
• Mandated monitoring for new components so that operational visibility is included as part of architecture and implementation.
• Directed the redesign of an alerts and webhooks system that had experienced long-running stability problems.
• Led the architecture restructuring and implementation of a multi-region EU cluster, launching and individually configuring 60 services within the allocated timeline and in line with business expectations.
• Automated regional deployment through Terraform, creating a repeatable long-term solution that shortened the timeframe required to launch additional regions.
• Promoted high availability through snapshot backups of critical databases and recovery-conscious platform design.
• Enforced idempotent processing across event-driven systems to support at-least-once event delivery without unsafe duplicate effects.
• Strengthened protection of sensitive data through secure vault storage, database encryption using PostgreSQL pgcrypto, OAuth, and JWT authentication.
• Reviewed architecture proposals from other teams and recommended design changes that were accepted and implemented.
• Presented technical direction to senior leadership and drove AI adoption through presentations and mentoring for engineers.
• Hired approximately half of the current backend team, strengthening engineering capacity and reducing reliance on a small number of specialists.

Senior Backend Developer

HouseME | February 2017 - February 2021

• Joined as one of the first 3 developers and shaped the early product architecture, backend implementation strategy, and engineering practices.
• Designed core customer-facing backend systems in C# and .NET Core, using CQRS and event sourcing to support scalable product evolution and reliable state transitions.
• Led containerisation and the migration from Azure to AWS with Kubernetes, establishing a more scalable deployment model and improving operational flexibility.
• Drove CI/CD and production-readiness improvements, introduced Python for analytics, built internal tools in Go, and mentored junior engineers.

Software Development Engineer

Peralex Electronics | December 2015 - November 2018

• Designed a cross-platform C++ client-server application for software-defined radio systems, including networked applications handling data streams of up to 10 Gbps.

Leadership Evidence

• Directly managed up to 6 developers, influenced a 16-person backend organisation, and led architecture adoption across 3 backend teams.
• Recruited approximately 50% of the current backend team.
• Authored architecture standards and usage documentation adopted across the backend organisation.
• Influenced peer-team architecture decisions through design reviews and recommendations accepted by the implementing teams.
• Presented technical direction to senior leadership and drove company-wide AI enablement through presentations and mentoring.
• Owned architecture, delivery risk, release quality, monitoring, high availability, security, and operational improvement.

Education

BSc Eng Mechatronics with Honours

University of Cape Town | 2012 - 2015

• First class for final-year project/thesis.
• Golden Key Honours Society member.

Target Positioning

Target roles: Technical Team Lead, Backend Technical Lead, Principal Backend Engineer, Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Lead.
Target environments: Enterprise technology companies, established product companies, and stable scale-ups.
Preferred locations: Melbourne or Sydney, Australia.
Relocation: Requires employer sponsorship.