Ronald Suwandi

— My experiences —

Independent Software Consultant

BitCraft Solutions

March 2025 – Present | Singapore

Founded a software consulting and product development company focused on high-quality engineering and scalable systems
Contracted to Confluent to lead Kafka/Confluent Platform deployments for enterprise clients, designing multi-datacenter stretch cluster architectures and implementing infrastructure automation using Ansible and Kubernetes
Launched Oh Yah!, a mobile app helping parents guide children through structured daily routines with focused timers, photo-based task completion, and reward systems. Available on iOS App Store
Leading the design and implementation of an event tracking and analytics system for an interactive exhibition, including a dynamic dashboard and performance optimisation to handle high traffic during key events
Developing a frontend interface for visualising trading activity and detecting suspicious patterns as part of a financial monitoring platform

Senior Software Engineer (Contract)

Oliver Wyman

June 2024 – November 2024 | Singapore

Built a digital lending platform for a banking client, with a focus on backend engineering
Provided strategic guidance on technical approaches, aligning development with client requirements and business goals
Proposed improvements in testing frameworks, Kafka version upgrades, and environment setup to enhance platform robustness and scalability
Collaborated with stakeholders to anticipate potential issues and create actionable plans, ensuring smooth project execution

Senior Software Engineer

ShopBack

September 2023 – March 2024 | Singapore

Played a key role in the company-wide Multi-Tenancy initiative, contributing to cost savings of $2.1M/year and reducing new country launch times from 6 months to 1 month
Collaborated with cross-functional teams, ensuring seamless integration of Kafka Connect for database streaming and addressing technical gaps with Data Engineers
Led the database streaming efforts for the team, defining goals, planning milestones, and unblocking other teams during their onboarding process
Debugged and optimised query performance, reducing execution times significantly by over 90% from 6 seconds to 200ms
Contributed to roadmap planning and project management, working closely with team members and product teams to ensure alignment with business priorities

Senior Software Engineer

Indeed

September 2022 – March 2023 | Singapore

Led a cost-reduction initiative, cutting monthly expenses by 64% ($51k) through infrastructure optimisations, including Redis migration to AWS
Collaborated with stakeholders across regions (US and Japan) to revamp and scale a rule-based engine, integrating it with A/B testing tools, resulting in improved business outcomes
Engineered a comprehensive metrics dashboard for monitoring Redis migration, improving team efficiency and enhancing on-call workflows
Quickly resolved critical system outages, leading to improved system reliability and performance stability bringing response times back from minutes to the normal 100ms range
Introduced best practices for Terraform, ensuring code quality and scalability, sharing knowledge across the company

Consulting Engineer

Confluent

November 2020 – May 2022 | Singapore

Led technical consulting and strategic implementation of Confluent products across diverse industries, including banking, gaming, and government, ensuring that deployments aligned with client objectives and industry best practices
Advised clients on the design and architecture of High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions, enabling them to scale Kafka clusters across cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on-premise environments, ensuring system resilience and business continuity
Collaborated with client stakeholders, including technical leads, to identify business-critical use cases and drive the successful implementation of high-performance, low-latency streaming solutions
Developed a proof-of-concept for financial clients, showcasing Confluent’s capabilities in handling massive data throughput (90,000+ messages per second) with low latency (100ms), resulting in long-term client adoption
Acted as the regional go-to expert, partnering with sales teams to tailor technical solutions to client needs, providing consultative guidance to address high-scale data processing challenges and help clients achieve their business goals

Platform Architect & Team Lead

Security Risk (now Software Risk)

June 2019 – November 2020 | Singapore

Provided mentorship and conducted interviews (Backend and DevOps, primarily for senior engineers), ensuring candidates were assessed on both technical skills and alignment with company culture, motivation, and soft skills
Led the onboarding and quality assessment process for new hires, offering strategic guidance to senior management on probation evaluations and setting engineers up for long-term success
Collaborated with the CTO and product management to shape product requirements, incorporating client feedback and driving improvements in roadmap planning
Led engineering process improvements, including code review workflows, CI/CD pipeline setup, and incident post-mortem analysis, ensuring operational reliability and engineering excellence
Promoted to lead platform architecture, overseeing the development of high-performance services and managing critical initiatives for the engineering team

Senior Software Engineer & DevOps Engineer

Security Risk (now Software Risk)

June 2018 – June 2019 | Singapore

Senior Software Engineer

Eyeota (now

July 2015 – June 2018 | Singapore

Mentored and conducted interviews for senior-level engineers, ensuring that new hires aligned with company culture, motivation, and soft skills, in addition to technical proficiency. Led onboarding efforts, helping new engineers get up to speed quickly and contribute effectively
Led a key initiative to develop and manage a business-critical backend system for the adtech platform, responsible for audience segment mapping, reporting, and targeting, directly impacting revenue generation
Drove the architecture and design of a manual machine learning validation system for the Data Science team, ensuring reliability and performance in a high-stakes, data-driven environment
Ensured operational excellence by setting up and overseeing DevOps practices, improving system stability, and proactively identifying performance bottlenecks

Software Engineer

Krux Digital (now Salesforce)

September 2014 – May 2015 | Sydney

Software Engineer

Local Measure

February 2014 – September 2014 | Sydney

Software Engineer (Contract)

Murray Hurps Software Pty Ltd

July 2013 – February 2014 | Sydney

Senior Software Engineer

SolveIT Software (now Schneider Electric)

February 2009 – July 2013 | Adelaide

— My personal projects —

Oh Yah! - Daily Routine Management for Kids

Project page

March 2025 – Present | Singapore

A mobile app designed to help parents guide children ages 5-12 through structured daily routines. Features include distraction-free timers, photo-based task completion, parent review system with automated rewards, and support for multiple child profiles. Available on iOS App Store

ThinkFish

Project page

February 2025 | Singapore

Built a rapid prototype integrating Stockfish with LLM-generated explanations to analyse chess moves, aiming to bridge the gap between engine calculations and human reasoning. Found key AI limitations—LLMs often misinterpret board states and struggle with structured logic, leading to subtle hallucinations and explanations. Recently refined by adding FEN for better context and testing a game review feature to improve output quality. Tested GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, with GPT-4o performing better but still unreliable. Completed as a proof-of-concept with no plans for further development

chessterm

Project page

December 2024 – February 2025 | Singapore

Developed a terminal-based chess engine from scratch in Rust using bitboard data structures for efficient move validation. Implemented comprehensive chess rules including complex edge cases for pins, checks, stalemate detection, and en passant captures. Built a terminal UI using ratatui with custom PNG rendering, focusing on PGN notation input to improve tournament preparation skills

LogWeight

August 2017 | Singapore

Developed a React Native app for iOS that allows users to quickly log their weight into the Health App, featuring a simple and intuitive design.

Neural networks library

Project page

April 2016 – December 2016 | Singapore

Built a Clojure-based neural networks library on top of the core.matrix package. Inspired by Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course, the library is modular, allowing for easy swapping of optimisers, activation functions, stopping conditions, and cost functions.

wearther

April 2013 – July 2015 | Sydney

Created a web application that helps users decide what to wear based on the current weather. Developed an optimiser called MACHO, based on Ant Colony Optimisation algorithms, to quickly calculate the best clothing combinations. Featured in both StartupsFM and StartupDaily.

#hashtagoverload

July 2013 – December 2013 | Sydney

A simple mobile-first webapp that translate the sentence into a hashtag format and also gives you some suggestion keywords. Powered by jQuery and Big Huge Thesaurus.

— Educations —

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

Certificate

September 2021 - September 2024 | Singapore

Confluent Certified Developer for Apache Kafka

Certificate

March 2021 - March 2023 | Singapore

Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka

Certificate

March 2021 - March 2023 | Singapore

Learn Kubernetes from a DevOps guru (Kubernetes + Docker)

Certificate