Ronald Suwandi

As a passionate engineer with a love for building high-quality products and leading teams, I bring a wealth of experience to the table. With expertise in Java, Golang, and Clojure, as well as proficiency in JavaScript, I have the skills needed to build robust, efficient services and tackle complex challenges. My interests lie in developing large scale distributed systems as well as exploring machine learning pipelines

I'm also a father to two adorably cute and weird sons.

— My experiences —

Senior Software Engineer

Indeed

September 2022 – March 2023 | Singapore

Spearheaded cross-functional engineering efforts and collaborated with stakeholders across different regions to integrate their rule-based engine into our platform, resulting in positive business metrics in three targeted markets
Contributed to the overall cost reduction of $51,000/month (64% cost reduction). Led the engineering efforts for Redis to AWS migration and implementing log cost reduction measures
Proactively created comprehensive metrics dashboards for Redis migration, enabling the team to efficiently handle on-call duties
Collaborated and investigated various issues with multiple stakeholders across regions, figuring out the root cause of the problem and collaborating with the owner to address the problems with the right tradeoff
Guided team members on the best practices of Terraform, prepared comprehensive documentation on the structure and rationale behind the Terraform code
Swiftly diagnosed and resolved critical production issues, ensuring adherence to SLO and minimizing customer impact

Tech Lead Analyst

Citibank

May 2022 – September 2022 | Singapore

Consulting Engineer

Confluent

November 2020 – May 2022 | Singapore

Collaborated with clients across diverse industries, including banking, gaming, and government, to implement Confluent product deployments using tools such as Ansible and Kubernetes/OpenShift. Demonstrated best practices in administration, security setup, and SSL/TLS certificate configuration, while also troubleshooting various issues
Designed, implemented, and tested High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) cluster architectures, incorporating Kafka Streams end-to-end encryption with KMS, for banking and government clients on various cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on-premise. This allows the clients to achieve compliance and meet their targets
Built a high-performing proof-of-concept for a financial sector client, utilizing fan-out architecture to handle 90,000 messages per second with a 27x write amplification rate. Successfully scaled the downstream message rate to 2.5 million messages per second while maintaining a low end-to-end latency of 50-100ms
Created a brand new Kafka Connector to enable seamless integration between Google PubSub Lite and Kafka, enhancing clients' data processing capabilities and expanding their toolset
Partnered with the sales team to identify customers' pain points and showcased how the streaming platform from Confluent can effectively address their challenges resulting in improved customer satisfaction and retention

Platform Architect & Team Lead

Security Risk

June 2019 – November 2020 | Singapore

Designed and built a performant API service for an environment with a low and unstable Internet connection. The service is consumed by both mobile and web apps using Go, Postgres and Postgis
Drive the initiative to setup and maintained various Ops related flow including incident post-mortem report, managing Kubernetes cluster, logging and monitoring infrastructure using both Stackdriver and Prometheus
Managed team of engineers based in Singapore and Australia. Led project tasks breakdown and prioritization, guiding them through best practices and providing mentorship
Delivering engineering excellence by providing extensive documentations, deployment checklist, operations guidelines as well as established development workflow for to maintain high quality codebase through tests and code reviews

Senior Software Engineer & DevOps Engineer

Security Risk

June 2018 – June 2019 | Singapore

Designed and developed a Java-based backend API using Spring Boot, TypeScript, and MongoDB, providing essential functionality for the application
Created and managed multiple Kubernetes clusters for various environments using GKE and Helm, both on local servers and on Google Cloud, streamlining deployment and ensuring consistent performance
Established a robust CI/CD environment to maintain code quality, reducing the likelihood of issues and improving overall efficiency
Containerized backend applications using Docker, enabling seamless deployment across a range of environments while also improving scalability and maintainability

Senior Software Engineer

Eyeota

July 2015 – June 2018 | Singapore

Designed and built a high-performance, distributed backend system that interfaces with multiple other systems, including a web application, configuration provider, and reporting engine, using Clojure, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra
Ensured the system's stability and uptime by performing various DevOps duties, such as monitoring metrics with Grafana and Graphite, managing deployment with Ansible, and analyzing JVM heap dumps using MAT/VisualVM
Optimized various inefficient queries, resulting in significant improvements of up to 150x in certain cases, reducing query times from 5 seconds to just 30 milliseconds. Additionally, analyzed JVM heap dumps to improve the stability of heap space usage
Led the launch of a backend system for a web application that enables manual validation of segment/URL predictions for the Data Science team, utilizing Go and PostgreSQL to achieve optimal performance and reliability
Mentored, interviewed, and onboarded new engineers, providing guidance and support to help them succeed in their roles
Created and open-sourced Kani, a Clojure-based application for Cassandra backup with Unicode support

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