Senior Consultant · Senior Software Engineer

Sdu Gumede

Johannesburg, South Africa[email protected]sduu.dev github.com/sduduzog

Profile

Senior Consultant and software engineer with 6+ years of hands-on engineering experience delivering and operating production systems across retail, financial services and insurance. Owns complex client problems from discovery and architecture through implementation, release and measurable production outcomes. Works across mobile, backend and web systems, choosing pragmatic designs, improving engineering standards and remaining accountable for how software behaves in production.

Professional experience

7+ years · South Africa and UK client teams

Works directly with UK retail, fintech and insurance clients, leading technical direction while remaining responsible for implementation, production outcomes and mentoring.

Redesigned SmartShop’s Android connectivity handling around modern network callbacks and a single source of truth, eliminating false positives and stabilising handset behaviour; within 24 hours of release, New Relic events fell from approximately 11.4K to 468 and affected handsets from approximately 1.5K to 85.
Consolidated fragmented handset-readiness events across application versions into one New Relic event with contextual attributes, simplifying dashboard reporting and enabling aggregate analysis without losing diagnostic detail.
Resolved a production defect in SmartShop’s handset docking and session-reset flow by centralising logout and holding-screen navigation at the application level, eliminating screen-dependent lifecycle races and adding deterministic regression coverage for hardware events.
Leads Daemon’s engagement at Sainsbury’s while continuing hands-on engineering, maintaining visibility of delivery progress, dependencies, risks and mitigations across both organisations.

Replaced a SwiftPOS-only connector with a configurable provider architecture, owning the shared contract as requirements evolved; delivered three completed, validated integrations that expanded point-of-sale options for future merchant onboarding, with Oracle ready for partner certification.
Established manual end-to-end testing as part of the team’s delivery process, capturing findings as prioritised defects and creating a repeatable feedback loop that surfaced non-obvious integration bugs for iterative resolution.

Led the selection and initial production implementation of WorkflowCore for AJ Bell’s benefits case-management platform, defining its distributed AWS architecture, persistence, start and resume APIs, and testable workflow-action patterns; the resulting team platform completed its first payout the same day, with four more paid and 44 cases in final processing.
Rebuilt the project’s Playwright test setup around composable builders and isolated data, eliminating flaky tests caused by shared setup, improving CI reliability and making the full suite easier to extend.

Sdu GumedeSenior Consultant · Senior Software Engineer

Professional experience, continued

Centralised duplicated profile and address validation across three TypeScript repositories, giving producers and consumers one shared contract; the work exposed conflicting address models and prompted the business to clarify which properties were required.
Secured adoption of Drizzle-authored migrations for production schema changes, replacing database introspection; applied and reinforced testable Lambda data-access patterns through delivery, code review and team guidance as the wider refactor progressed.
Introduced a layered testing approach for AWS Lambda services, testing handlers against mocked dependencies, service logic independently and selected handler-to-service paths, shifting tests from coverage targets towards clear behavioural verification.
Mentored a junior engineer through pair programming, TDD and behaviour-focused testing, improving her independence and ability to verify the behaviour changed by her work.

Worked across Famous Brands and SPAR products, moving from end-to-end quality assurance into full-stack delivery spanning mobile, web and .NET services.

Replaced hard-coded frontend and backend permissions in a multi-brand commerce platform with dynamic role-based access control scoped by store, brand and region, preventing access outside each user’s authorised operational scope.
Modernised a legacy AngularJS back-office application by overhauling its build system, introducing Jest and enabling TypeScript, resulting in faster builds, more accessible testing and smoother onboarding.
Built and maintained React Native applications for ordering and retail rewards, integrating push notifications, deep links, native modules and analytics while managing Android releases to Google Play.
Built reusable .NET sagas and workflows for long-running ordering, campaign, promotion and voucher processes across Yumbi and SPAR, providing shared orchestration without duplicating flow logic between products.

Tested customer-facing web and mobile applications for Famous Brands and SPAR Rewards, alongside the Famous Brands management platform and franchisee dashboard; maintained feature and regression cases while helping resolve specification gaps from design through delivery.
Introduced automated post-deployment checks into the delivery pipeline, reducing smoke-test time from 30–40 minutes to 5–10 minutes, and began contributing frontend production code before moving into software engineering.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

University of Zululand

2019

Projects

Designed, built and operates a production task-management platform using Elixir, Phoenix, Vue and PostgreSQL. Its permission-scoped MCP server gives AI agents structured access to task search, planning, scheduling and sharing through OAuth and granular read/write scopes. Used Amp, Claude Code, OpenCode with oh-my-opencode and GitHub Copilot across development, backed by automated backend and Playwright tests.

Published and maintains a Kotlin Android application with 350+ GitHub stars and 500+ commits, demonstrating sustained product ownership, public releases and collaboration with an open-source user community.

Speaking and community

Presented “My Point of Vue” at JoziJS and delivered internal engineering sessions that helped teams adopt new frontend, database-migration and testing practices.
Co-hosted 34 episodes of ZATechRadioand helps run its South African technology community, hosting conversations about engineering careers, workplace practice and the realities of working in tech.

Sdu Gumede

Professional experience

Daemon

Sainsbury’s SmartShop

Amazon Just Walk Out

AJ Bell

Domestic & General

Codeo

Software Engineer

Junior Quality Assurance Engineer

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Projects

Duun

Slim Launcher