Principal .NET engineer for fintech and gaming back ends, plus security reviews.

I built core .NET systems for a B2B iGaming slots platform with AWS, Terraform, RabbitMQ and Confluent Kafka. My focus was the rule-based statistical models behind the slot game mechanics, tuned and verified against certified return-to-player (RTP) targets with large-scale simulation in CI. I also built the end-to-end test harness that runs the whole platform locally and checks a bet through every service, database and report, and set up alerting and dashboards as code with Terraform and Grafana. I worked on some of the company’s first games, when building a game’s back end by hand took months, because getting RTP right is hard. In 2026 we adopted AI-assisted engineering, using coding agents with test-first development and code review, and by the end of my time there we were delivering back-end games at least three times faster with no loss of quality.

I joined as a Senior Software Engineer, missing hands-on IC work after the tech lead role. I built .NET back ends on Azure with Akka.NET and Confluent Kafka for a high-throughput sports betting platform, processing streams of live market updates during in-play fixtures. I owned the virtual football fixture and market-data integration into the feed-management platform, adding a new set of markets and a new product offering for the business.

I spent two years as a senior developer building .NET Core microservices with Docker, Terraform and SQL, mainly on Azure, for fintech clients including Derayah in Saudi Arabia and Capitec, then was promoted to .NET Tech Lead for the company’s .NET chapter.

Working with that chapter, I established cross-team architectural standards, including DDD-shaped repositories and Snyk and Trivy security scans in CI, and researched and rolled out new tech to teams. I built sprint-zero vertical slices for new client projects, including Derayah’s D360 on Kubernetes, so incoming teams had infrastructure, repos and CI/CD in place and could ship features from the first sprint.

I also held team 1:1s, provided project support, led the .NET chapter forums, wrote new technical interview questionnaires and interviewed candidates as the chapter grew.

An AI startup spun out of New Media Labs; I was one of its first team members. We built consumer-facing chatbots on early language models, two for Nedgroup Investments and one for Nedbank Insurance, which went live for both clients. I set up the initial Facebook integration, implemented much of the core framework, trained the LUIS.ai language models and onboarded new team members.

I worked across a range of client projects on Azure and on-prem, including a plant-management system for AES and a content-management system for Nedgroup Investments.