Ronald Suwandi

Seasoned engineer with 15+ years of experience in building high-quality products and leading teams to success. Proficient in Java, Golang, JavaScript, Kafka and reputation for efficiently solving complex challenges. Proven ability to manage multi-discipline teams and align technical efforts with business objectives. Passionate about both technology and leadership. Father to two wonderful sons

— My experiences —

Senior Software Engineer (Contract)

Oliver Wyman

June 2024 – Present | Singapore

Subcontracted via Aryan Solutions

Senior Software Engineer

ShopBack

September 2023 – March 2024 | Singapore

Led the team's implementation of Kafka Connect in response to the organization-wide directive to regionalize the platform, ensuring seamless cross-country operations
Strategically broke down the implementation into milestones, fostering a structured approach to project management. Proactively addressed concerns, guided the team through each phase, and contributed to a successful overall implementation
Played a pivotal role in providing support beyond my team, actively engaging with other teams to unblock challenges, swiftly addressing queries, and sharing insights gained from the milestone-based approach to ensure the successful adoption of streaming solutions
Identified and addressed various issues during the streaming journey, contributing to an updated runbook and knowledge-sharing initiatives to prevent similar challenges in other teams
Directed the launch of new country operations, collaborating closely with product teams and other departments to gather essential information, and refined the country launch checklist to streamline future expansions
Applied in-depth debugging skills to resolve Postgres slow queries, delving into the TypeORM code base. Improved query performance significantly from 6 seconds down to 200 milliseconds

Senior Software Engineer

Indeed

September 2022 – March 2023 | Singapore

Led engineering effort and collaboration with cross-region stakeholders to extend their rule-based engine to our platform for our market. Kicked off experiment with 3 targeted markets which yielded the business metrics to have a positive trend
Engineered a 64% reduction in monthly costs ($51k) by leading the migration from Redis to AWS as well as log cost reduction, closely working with team leads and other relevant stakeholders
Initiated and executed a comprehensive metrics dashboard project for the Redis migration, optimizing on-call duties and team efficiency in collaboration with global partners
Investigated and resolved critical production issues with multiple stakeholders across regions, figuring out the root cause and collaborating with theem to address the problems with the right tradeoff
Provided technical leadership within my team by guiding members on Terraform best practices and creating comprehensive documentation which is shared company-wide that includes insights into the tradeoffs and rationale behind the code structure

Consulting Engineer

Confluent

November 2020 – May 2022 | Singapore

Engaged customers across diverse industries (banking, game, government) to lead the implementation of Confluent products deployment (Ansible, Kubernetes/OpenShift based), establishing best practices, overseeing administration, configuring security setups, SSL/TLS certificates, and effectively troubleshooting various issues.
Led the design and testing of High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) cluster architectures, executed Kafka Streams end-to-end encryption with KMS on various cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure), as well as on-premise environments
Led the development of a proof-of-concept for a financial sector, implementing fan-out architecture to handle 90,000 messages per second—double their current peak traffic spike. Successfully scaled downstream to 2.5 million messages per second while maintaining an impressive 50-100ms end-to-end latency maintaining stability and running smoothly throughout
Initiated and developed a new Kafka Connector to seamlessly connect Google PubSub Lite with Kafka, expanding clients' data processing capabilities and enhancing their toolset
Collaborated closely with the sales team, gaining insights into customers' pain points, and effectively demonstrated how leveraging the Confluent streaming platform could address and solve their specific challenges

Platform Architect & Team Lead

Security Risk

June 2019 – November 2020 | Singapore

Collaborated closely with the CTO and product management, leveraging direct client interaction to shape product requirements and improve project outcomes
Spearheaded the design and implementation of a high-performance API service crucial for low and unstable internet environments, utilized Go, Postgres, and Postgis
Led a distributed team of engineers based in Singapore and Australia, providing mentorship and establishing development workflows. Guided the team through best practices, ensuring a high-quality codebase through tests and code reviews
Drove the initiative to set up and maintained various Ops-related workflows, including incident p ost-mortem reporting, Kubernetes cluster management, and logging/monitoring infrastructure. This significantly enhanced the team's efficiency and the overall reliability of the system
Delivered engineering excellence through extensive documentation, deployment checklists, and operational guidelines. Maintained a high standard of code quality and contributed to the team's overall excellence

Senior Software Engineer & DevOps Engineer

Security Risk

June 2018 – June 2019 | Singapore

Spearheaded the design and development of a critical Java-based backend API using Spring Boot, TypeScript, and MongoDB, establishing the foundation for the application's functionality and performance
Orchestrated the creation and management of multiple Kubernetes clusters, seamlessly deploying applications across diverse environments, including on-premise and Google Cloud Platform. This streamlined deployment processes and ensured consistent operational efficiency
Implemented a robust CI/CD environment to improve code quality and reduce potential issues, significantly enhancing operational efficiency across the development lifecycle
Played a pivotal role in implementing Docker for seamless deployments, contributing to improved scalability and maintainability in alignment with the directive of the CTO

Senior Software Engineer

Eyeota

July 2015 – June 2018 | Singapore

Architected and constructed a high-performance, distributed backend system interfacing with critical components, such as a web application, configuration provider, and reporting engine, using Clojure, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra
Ensured system stability and uptime through comprehensive DevOps responsibilities, including metric monitoring with Grafana and Graphite, deployment management with Ansible, and JVM heap dump analysis using MAT/VisualVM
Optimized a range of inefficient queries, achieving notable performance improvements of up to 150x and reducing query times from 5 seconds to just 30 milliseconds. Additionally, employed advanced JVM heap dump analysis techniques to enhance heap space usage stability
Led the successful launch of a backend system supporting manual validation for the Data Science team, achieving optimal performance and reliability with Go and PostgreSQL
Provided mentorship, conducted interviews, and facilitated onboarding for new engineers, ensuring they were equipped to excel in their roles.
Developed and open-sourced Kani, a Clojure-based application for Cassandra backup with Unicode support, showcasing a commitment to knowledge sharing and community contribution

Software Engineer

Krux Digital

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

— Stuff I've worked on —

LogWeight

App store link

August 2017 | Singapore

LogWeight is the fastest way to track weight into iOS Health App with simple and intuitive design. Written in React Native.

Neural networks library

Project page

April 2016 – December 2016 | Singapore

Clojure-based neural networks library that is built on top of core.matrix package. I decided to create this library after completing Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course. The library is very modular where you can easily swap optimizer, activation/sigmoid functions, stopping conditions and cost function.

wearther

http://wearther.cc

April 2013 – July 2015 | Sydney

wearther is a web application (Node.js, Backbone, Titanium SDK for the native app version) that helps you decide what to wear based on the current weather. wearther's optimizer - MACHO (Multiobjective Ant Colony Heuristic-based Optimisation) is derived from an artificial intelligence algorithm (Ant Colony Optimisation) to calculate the best clothing combinations quickly so you can leave home feeling just right. Not too cold, and not too warm.

Featured in both StartupsFM and StartupDaily

#hashtagoverload

http://hashtagoverload.me

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