Brandon Piner

Principal Software Engineer | Technical Lead | Backend Platforms and Distributed Systems

Cape Town, South Africa
Email: brandon@openprocess.me
Phone: +27 72 255 2972
LinkedIn: za.linkedin.com/in/brandonpiner1
Website: OpenProcess.me
Australian work rights: Requires employer sponsorship; preferred locations Melbourne or Sydney

Professional Summary

Principal-level backend engineer and technical leader with 15+ years of experience designing, modernising, and operating high-scale customer-facing platforms. Hands-on expertise in C#/.NET, Python, distributed systems, real-time data, APIs, event-driven architecture, AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres, and Terraform. Known for turning ambiguous technical problems into scalable, maintainable, secure, and production-ready systems while aligning multiple teams around clear architecture and delivery priorities.

Targeted Impact

• Scaled a customer-facing platform processing over 1 TB of data daily from more than 100,000 hardware sensors for thousands of customers.
• Reduced large-customer load times from 30 seconds to 2 seconds through a real-time state-management redesign.
• Improved production stability from near-weekly serious outages to more than one year without a serious outage.
• Reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 5% and average code-review turnaround from 2 days to the same day.
• Delivered a multi-region EU cluster involving 60 individually configured services, with Terraform enabling faster future regional expansion.
• Led architecture standards adopted across a 16-person backend organisation and influenced peer teams through accepted design recommendations.

Relevant Strengths

• Lead architecture for real-time, distributed backend systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven platforms, and multi-region deployments.
• Design systems that process real-time data to trigger state changes, notifications, and live dashboards.
• Align engineering teams, product owners, cybersecurity specialists, and senior stakeholders around technical direction and delivery risk.
• Elevate testing, monitoring, release safety, high availability, security, and deployment practices.
• Build engineering capability through hiring, mentoring, technical standards, documentation, and AI enablement.

Technical Skills

Backend: Python, C#/.NET Core, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL
Architecture: Microservices, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, message buses, CQRS, event sourcing, domain-driven design
Data and integration: Kafka, Postgres, HTTP/REST APIs, gRPC, MQTT, real-time state management
Cloud and DevOps: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions/Workflows, Docker, CI/CD, continuous deployment
Reliability and security: Monitoring, alert analysis, high availability, snapshot backups, idempotent event processing, at-least-once delivery, secure vault storage, PostgreSQL pgcrypto, OAuth, JWT

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, using AI to customise email-categorisation recommendations while balancing cost, speed to market, scalability, and adaptability.
• Own product direction, technical architecture, delivery priorities, security decisions, and implementation across multiple initiatives.

Technical Team Lead, Backend and Android

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

• Lead backend engineering across 3 teams, directly managing up to 6 developers and influencing architecture across a 16-person backend organisation.
• Set architecture direction for platforms aggregating data from more than 100,000 hardware sensors, processing over 1 TB per day, and supporting thousands of customers.
• Designed real-time data flows that trigger state changes, notifications, and live dashboards for core customer-facing functionality.
• Authored architecture standards, rules, and usage documentation adopted across the backend teams.
• Spearheaded the redesign of a critical real-time state-management platform, reducing large-customer load times from approximately 30 seconds to 2 seconds and enabling horizontal scalability.
• Simplified the system structure, established full test coverage, and reduced cloud infrastructure costs by 5% through architecture and deployment optimisation.
• Introduced developer-cycle workflows that reduced average code-review turnaround from 2 days to the same day, increasing throughput in a continuous-deployment environment.
• Established staging and stricter production-release controls, reducing serious outages from near-weekly occurrences to more than one year without a serious outage.
• Led a multi-region EU cluster involving the launch and individual configuration of 60 services; used Terraform to make future regional expansion faster and repeatable.
• Drove monitoring and reliability improvements by analysing frequent pages, ensuring new components were monitored, and directing the redesign of an unstable alerts and webhooks system.
• Strengthened operational resilience through database snapshot backups and idempotent event processing for at-least-once delivery.
• Protected sensitive data through secure vault storage, PostgreSQL pgcrypto, OAuth, and JWT authentication.
• Influenced peer-team architecture decisions through accepted design recommendations, presented technical direction to senior leadership, and drove AI adoption through engineer mentoring.
• Hired approximately half of the current backend team.

Senior Backend Developer

HouseME | February 2017 - February 2021

• Joined as one of the first 3 developers and shaped the early product architecture and engineering practices.
• Designed customer-facing backend systems in C# and .NET Core using CQRS and event sourcing.
• Led containerisation and migration from Azure to AWS with Kubernetes, improving scalability and deployment flexibility.
• Drove CI/CD and production-readiness improvements, introduced Python for analytics, 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.

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 Position

Principal Software Engineer – Personalisation & Digital Experience
Target environment: Large-scale enterprise digital product organisation.
Preferred locations: Melbourne or Sydney, Australia.
Work rights: Requires employer sponsorship.