Ronald Suwandi

Experienced engineer with a strong track record in building high-quality products and leading teams to success. Adept in Java, Golang, JavaScript, Kafka and known for efficiently tackling complex challenges. Proven ability to manage multi-discipline teams and align technical efforts with business objectives. Passionate about both technology and people management. Father to two wonderful sons

— My experiences —

Senior Software Engineer

ShopBack

September 2023 – Present | Singapore

Senior Software Engineer

Indeed

September 2022 – March 2023 | Singapore

Led cross-functional engineering efforts, collaborating with global stakeholders to seamlessly integrate a rule-based engine, resulting in substantial business growth across three targeted markets
Orchestrated the migration from Redis to AWS, achieving a significant monthly cost reduction of $51,000 (a 64% decrease), showcasing a proficiency in cost-effective solutions
Spearheaded the creation of comprehensive metrics dashboards for the Redis migration, enhancing team efficiency in on-call duties
Diagnosed and resolved critical production issues with precision, maintaining adherence to Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and minimizing customer impact
Provided mentorship and guided team members on best practices in Terraform, ensuring a robust infrastructure foundation

Consulting Engineer

Confluent

November 2020 – May 2022 | Singapore

Collaborated with clients in diverse industries, including banking and government, to deploy Confluent products such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, ksqlDB and Kafka Connect. Demonstrated expertise in administration, security setup, and SSL/TLS certificate configuration
Designed and implemented High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) cluster architectures, ensuring compliance for banking and government clients across various cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Engineered a high-performing proof-of-concept for a financial sector client, handling 90,000 messages per second with a 27x write amplification rate, showcasing scalability and performance optimization skills
Innovated a brand new Kafka Connector to seamlessly integrate Google PubSub Lite and Kafka, expanding clients' data processing capabilities
Partnered with the sales team to identify customer pain points, driving increased customer satisfaction and retention

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
Designed and implemented a performant API service for low and unstable internet environments, utilizing Go, Postgres, and Postgis, showcasing adaptability and problem-solving skills
Led a distributed team of engineers based in Singapore and Australia, providing mentorship and establishing development workflows to maintain a high-quality codebase
Managed various Ops-related workflows including incident post-mortem reporting, Kubernetes cluster management, and logging/monitoring infrastructure setup using Stackdriver and Prometheus
Delivered engineering excellence through extensive documentation, deployment checklists, and operational guidelines, ensuring a high standard of code quality through tests and code reviews

Senior Software Engineer & DevOps Engineer

Security Risk

June 2018 – June 2019 | Singapore

Spearheaded the design and development of a critical Java-based backend API utilizing Spring Boot, TypeScript, and MongoDB, laying the foundation for the application's functionality and performance
Orchestrated the creation and management of multiple Kubernetes clusters across diverse environments, both on-premise and on Google Cloud Platform, streamlining deployment processes and ensuring consistent operational efficiency
Implemented a robust CI/CD environment, enhancing code quality and reducing potential issues, ultimately driving greater operational efficiency
Played a key role in implementing Docker for seamless deployments across various environments, contributing to improved scalability and maintainability as per 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 multiple critical components, including a web application, configuration provider, and reporting engine, using Clojure, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra
Ensured system stability and uptime by overseeing various 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, resulting in notable performance improvements, in some cases up to 150x, reducing query times from 5 seconds to just 30 milliseconds. Additionally, employed JVM heap dump analysis 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