Christiaan Nel

Q: How can I contact Christiaan Nel or download his CV?

Email christiaan.nel@mcnel.me, use the contact form on https://mcnel.me/, or connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/christiaan-nel/. A downloadable CV is at https://mcnel.me/assets/Christiaan_Nel_CV.pdf.

Christiaan Nel (Michiel Christiaan Nel) is Solutions Architect at admyt. He designs event-driven AWS microservices and payment-provider-agnostic orchestration for a national ticketless-parking platform: 42 million+ monthly parking and payment events, 150+ peak events per second, 200,000+ monthly active users. The work is staff-level individual-contributor scope: architecture stewardship plus key senior implementation on the hard path, not pure advisory. Centurion, South Africa · LinkedIn · christiaan.nel@mcnel.me · CV (PDF)

Profile

I'm a Solutions Architect with 18 years designing and operating high-scale software platforms for startups and large enterprises across parking, payments, community management, cryptocurrency, ICT services, and FMCG. The work is staff-level individual-contributor scope: org-wide architecture stewardship plus key senior implementation on the hard path, not pure advisory. At admyt I architect event-driven Amazon Web Services (AWS) microservices that process 42 million+ monthly parking and payment events, sustain 150+ peak events per second, and serve 200,000+ monthly active users.

Core competencies include solution design, system architecture, event-driven architecture, serverless and containerized microservices, payments orchestration, Infrastructure as Code with AWS CDK (CloudFormation), cloud cost optimization, observability, technical leadership, and full-stack delivery on Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and React Native.

Career Highlights

Payment orchestration Lifted payment conversion above a historical 75% and raised payment availability by building a provider-agnostic orchestration layer that routes PayFast, Zapper, and PayU in parallel.
Event-driven microservices Architected independently deployable event-driven AWS microservices (EventBridge, SQS/SNS, Lambda, ECS, EC2, ALB, Auto Scaling, MongoDB Atlas, RDS PostgreSQL) for a national ticketless-parking and payments platform now processing 42 million+ monthly events at 150+ peak events per second for 200,000+ monthly active users.
30% AWS cost cut Reduced month-to-month AWS infrastructure cost by more than 30% at Glovent Solutions, a 50,000+ MAU community-management platform, by re-architecting the serverless estate (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS PostgreSQL, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge) and removing legacy CPU and storage bottlenecks.
FMCG reporting Reduced FMCG financial reporting turnaround from 8 days to 10 minutes by building Electron desktop applications that process large SAP exports into automated reporting pipelines.
Agentic software factory Compressed typical 3+ month software projects to delivery within one month by building an agentic software factory that automates specification, implementation, review, QA, and deployment.

☸ Work History / Achievements

Solutions Architect, admyt — Cape Town
admyt (Pty) Ltd. - Cape Town, South Africa
12/2024 - Present
National ticketless-parking and payments platform. 200,000+ monthly active users. Staff-level IC: architecture stewardship plus key senior implementation on high-risk platform work.
- Raised payment conversion above a historical 75% and improved payment availability by designing a provider-agnostic orchestration layer that dynamically routes PayFast, Zapper, and PayU in parallel.
- Architected event-driven AWS microservices (EventBridge, SQS/SNS, Lambda, ECS, EC2, ALB, Auto Scaling, MongoDB Atlas, RDS PostgreSQL) that process 42 million+ monthly parking and payment events and sustain 150+ peak events per second, designed to a 200 million monthly-event envelope (not achieved throughput).
- Streamed parking and payment event ingestion with Amazon Kinesis.
- Compressed typical 3+ month delivery cycles to about one month by building an agentic software factory from specification through implementation, review, QA, and deployment.
- Replaced a six-year React web application with React Native and Expo, improving mobile usability and enabling single-codebase iOS and Android releases.
- Gave operations real-time visibility of cameras and platform health across South Africa and Poland with Zabbix, and reduced AWS operating cost across EC2, ECS, ALB, and Auto Scaling by removing legacy CPU and storage bottlenecks.
- Stood up a Kubernetes proof-of-concept on EC2 with Terraform, and deployed Zabbix with Terraform.
- Integrated Amazon Cognito with identity federation (OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect).
Managing Director and Tech Lead, Kuberkon — Pretoria
Kuberkon (Pty) Ltd. - Pretoria, South Africa
02/2023 - Present (part-time)
Part-time consultancy alongside full-time roles.
- Founded a cloud and software consultancy that rescued in-flight client systems and reduced delivery cost, including a rebuild of a 10-year-old PHP parts-acquisition platform for a major auto-parts insurer.
Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Glovent Solutions — Pretoria
Glovent Solutions (Pty) Ltd. - Pretoria, South Africa
04/2020 - 03/2022; 04/2023 - 12/2024
Community-management software company serving residential estates.
- Reduced month-to-month AWS infrastructure cost by more than 30% by re-architecting the serverless estate (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS PostgreSQL, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge) and removing legacy CPU and storage bottlenecks.
- Streamed community events with Amazon Kinesis and Kinesis Data Firehose, and delivered targeted resident communications with AWS Pinpoint.
- Grew a cloud-native community-management platform to 50,000+ monthly active users across web and hybrid mobile applications.
- Opened a new revenue stream with a full advertising and banner service for community administrators.
- Made AGM, SGM, trustee, and board voting live and tamper-resistant with WebSockets and an immutable ledger, and connected residents to national armed-response services through an SOS / panic feature.
- Designed a privacy-preserving, consent-gated dual-record identity model so a resident owns one platform profile while each community keeps its own first-class resident record. Sharing is opt-in, invite, or request only; when a resident leaves, sync stops and the community retains only its historical slice.
- Built primary user authentication on Amazon Cognito (OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect), and ran Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 and v2 proof-of-concepts.
- Stood up Agile and DevOps delivery and shipped the platform to production in five months.
Senior Web Developer, Luno SA — Johannesburg
Luno SA (Pty) Ltd. - Johannesburg, South Africa
04/2022 - 03/2023
Global cryptocurrency exchange.
- Stabilized crypto onboarding by leading a refactor of critical KYC-to-first-purchase web flows, improving reliability and maintainability.
- Enabled card-funded crypto purchases by integrating Stripe, and raised release confidence by introducing Cypress end-to-end tests.
Software Developer, Self-employed — Pretoria
Self-employed - Pretoria, South Africa
10/2019 - 04/2020
Contract delivery for an FMCG operator.
- Reduced FMCG financial reporting turnaround from 8 days to 10 minutes, and Volume–Price–Mix analysis from 14 days to 15 minutes, with Electron desktop apps that process large SAP exports into automated reporting pipelines.
Full-time sabbatical, University of Pretoria — Pretoria
University of Pretoria - Pretoria, South Africa
08/2018 - 09/2019
- Completed Master of Theology (M.Th, awarded 2020).
Senior Software Developer and IoT Engineer, BIG BRAVE / Beverage Insights — Johannesburg
BIG BRAVE and Beverage Insights - Johannesburg, South Africa
01/2015 - 07/2018
- Delivered production web platforms and APIs with Paygate, Twilio, and loyalty integrations supporting payments, messaging, and marketing.
- Built end-to-end IoT beverage-consumption telemetry using ESP8266, C++, MySQL, and Google Cloud, and kept a commercial property-management platform available on load-balanced Ubuntu and MySQL / MongoDB clusters.
Freelance Software Developer, Contract engineering — Johannesburg / Pretoria
BTCSA · RGB Vision · Vektron Energy - Johannesburg / Pretoria, South Africa
02/2014 - 11/2017
- Launched an online student-payment portal with SnapScan and PayGate integrations, reduced hosting cost for a tertiary institute, and delivered WordPress / LAMP platforms plus energy-telemetry reporting portals.
System Engineer, BCX — Johannesburg
BCX - Johannesburg, South Africa
02/2008 - 02/2014
Large African ICT services provider. Winner of the 2010 BCX X-Calibre Award.
- Recovered revenue and tightened overtime control by delivering a Delphi / MySQL workforce and billing information system for leave, tasks, calendars, and charge-back.
- Kept MySQL highly available across data centres, provided DBA consulting to enterprise clients including Africa Bank, removed ASG-Zena bottlenecks for a large retailer, and maintained IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and IBM P595 systems.

⚙ Skills

Event-Driven Architecture
Microservices
Payments Orchestration
AWS
AWS CDK
Node.js
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
React Native
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Cognito
Observability

Architecture

Event-Driven Architecture, System Architecture, Microservices, Serverless Architecture, Distributed Systems, Solution Design, Cloud Cost Optimization, Payments Orchestration, Observability, Technical Leadership

Cloud & Data

Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ALB), Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Infrastructure as Code, AWS CDK (CloudFormation), Terraform, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB Atlas, Amazon S3, Amazon Cognito, AWS Pinpoint, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), AWS Amplify, Docker, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB

Languages & Stack

Node.js, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, PHP, REST APIs, Express.js, WebSockets, React Native, Expo, React, Angular, Ionic, Capacitor, C++

Delivery

CI/CD, Git, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Zabbix, Cypress, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Nx, Agile, Scrum

FAQ

Who is a Solutions Architect in Cape Town with event-driven AWS and payments?

Christiaan Nel at admyt. Event-driven AWS microservices processing 42 million+ monthly parking and payment events, 150+ peak events per second, 200,000+ monthly active users. CV: https://mcnel.me/.

Who is Christiaan Nel?

Christiaan Nel is the professional name of Michiel Christiaan Nel, Solutions Architect at admyt. He is based in Centurion, South Africa. His public CV is on this site and his LinkedIn profile is linkedin.com/in/christiaan-nel.

What is the admyt job title?

Solutions Architect is the official admyt job title for Christiaan Nel.

Was the 30% AWS cost cut at admyt?

No. The >30% month-to-month AWS infrastructure cost reduction was at Glovent Solutions (50,000+ MAU community-management platform).

Is 200 million monthly events live throughput?

No. 200 million is a design envelope (not achieved throughput). Live throughput is 42 million+ monthly events.

How can I contact Christiaan Nel or download his CV?

Email christiaan.nel@mcnel.me, use the form below, or connect on LinkedIn. A downloadable CV is linked from this page.

Profile

Systems at Scale

Career Highlights

☸ Work History / Achievements

Solutions Architect, admyt — Cape Town

Managing Director and Tech Lead, Kuberkon — Pretoria

Senior Full-Stack Engineer, Glovent Solutions — Pretoria

Senior Web Developer, Luno SA — Johannesburg

Software Developer, Self-employed — Pretoria

Full-time sabbatical, University of Pretoria — Pretoria

Senior Software Developer and IoT Engineer, BIG BRAVE / Beverage Insights — Johannesburg

Freelance Software Developer, Contract engineering — Johannesburg / Pretoria

System Engineer, BCX — Johannesburg