Technical lead and solution architect with 16+ years in national health information exchanges, payment platforms and cloud infrastructure. I own the architecture, stay in the code, and make sure everyone knows where things stand.
Plenty of engineers can design a FHIR pipeline. What clients tend to remember is how the project felt: whether they knew where things stood, whether problems surfaced early, and whether the team was better off at the end.
Scope is where I start, not where I stop. If I spot a risk next to the work, I raise it, size it and deal with it instead of hoping someone else will.
In practiceFound and ran an unrequested payment security review on a lending platform: 52 findings, then drove the remediation through to production.
When a prescribed direction will hurt later, I say so early, in writing, and from first principles, so the people paying for it can follow the reasoning and decide.
In practiceMy architecture for a health insurer replaced the originally prescribed stack and was adopted as the programme's direction.
No surprises. Decisions are written down, demos happen live, and status is honest, including across time zones and async teams.
In practicePresented a full continuity-of-care flow live and solo at the OpenHIM Connectathon, and built MeshScope so anyone could see the system running.
The best sign I did the job well is that the team keeps going without me. I teach, pair, and hand over patterns people actually want to use.
In practicePatterns adopted independently at Yellow and on the Ethiopia platform. Ran training in Tanzania and Ethiopia, and AI practicals in-house.
When production is on fire, I’m there. I care whether the thing works on the day it matters, not whether my part was technically correct.
In practiceKept The Iconic’s fulfilment standing through a $10M Black Friday, on Australian hours from Cape Town.
I lead small teams and stay hands-on, so my decisions stay grounded and I never ask anyone to build something I wouldn’t build myself.
In practiceStill ships: built the full k3s/Helm/Terraform delivery platform on my current programme myself.
Whether you're filling a lead role or need a specialist embedded for a critical stretch, these are the problems I'm best at.
From blueprint to working sandbox: gateways, FHIR shared health records, master patient indexes, DHIS2 integration, national identity, and the workflow engines between them.
I join your team, own the architecture, lead delivery and stay in the code. Useful when you need senior judgement without a long hire.
Remove single points of failure, move to containers without a big-bang rewrite, and add the observability that lets your team sleep.
A second pair of eyes on money flows and reconciliation, and a structured remediation plan that actually reaches production.
Using language models where they help and fencing them where they can’t be trusted: rules-only calculations, cited sources, and QA gates with a human sign-off.
Led the engineering behind a proof of concept for Ethiopia's National Digital Health Interoperability Highway, then turned it into a reusable platform other country programmes can build on.
Deployed into the Ministry sandbox; the platform became the base for other countries
Lead architect on an eight-platform digital engagement and advice estate, operating under POPIA and FAIS, where the language models are deliberately fenced in.
My architecture replaced the prescribed stack and was adopted as the programme direction
Designed and built a national HIE on the Kenya Digital Health Super Highway blueprint while running three other digital health initiatives at the same time.
Presented the full continuity-of-care flow live and solo at the OpenHIM Connectathon 2024
Took a lending platform off a single server, wired up its payment and accounting integrations, then ran a security review nobody had asked for, which turned up 52 findings.
52 security findings raised and driven through remediation to production
Moved a serverless platform onto containers one service at a time, and left behind a pattern the client's engineers went on to use without me.
Migration pattern adopted independently by the wider engineering team
Led a five-person team supporting order and inventory systems handling 50,000+ orders a day, including a Black Friday with $10M in single-day sales.
Kept fulfilment standing through a $10M Black Friday
A platform I built solo and open-sourced. It sits on top of any FHIR server and lets patients claim and control their own clinical records.
Open-sourced, with an NPM component library for any JavaScript EMR
From junior developer to team lead on the open-source health infrastructure behind MomConnect and OpenHIM, now running in national exchanges across multiple countries.
Trained in-country engineering teams in Tanzania and Ethiopia
I didn't skip steps, and that's why I can lead engineers well: I've done every job on the team, from junior developer upward.
I'm a technical lead at Symbionix, a Cape Town consultancy, where I'm embedded end to end with health and fintech clients. Before that I led a team keeping The Iconic's fulfilment running through Australia's biggest shopping days. Before that I spent seven years at Jembi Health Systems, growing from junior developer to team lead on the open-source infrastructure that now carries health data between national systems.
The through-line is that I like being accountable for whether something works, not just whether my piece of it compiles. That's why I go looking for problems outside my lane, why I over-communicate, and why I care about the people on the team as much as the architecture.
Away from the keyboard the building continues at a smaller scale: a koi pond with named residents, a solar and battery system I monitor a little too closely, and home automation on a Raspberry Pi. I like systems I can see working.
Tell me what you're building and where it hurts. I'll reply within a working day with honest thoughts, even if I'm not the right fit.