Software Engineer
Ian Sawala

Software Engineer specializing in building scalable distributed systems and cross-platform applications. Earned First Class Honours in Computer Science while working full-time to architect core infrastructure for a startup. Focused on real-time data pipelines and system design architectures. Passionate about solving complex problems, designing systems and reducing technical debt.

Core Technologies
JavaGoRustDartTypeScriptNestJSFlutterPostgreSQLNeo4jRedisAWSAzureDockerKafka

Featured Projects

A selection of projects demonstrating expertise in cloud architecture, full-stack development, and data engineering.

Pacaya Mobile App
A cross-platform social media application with elastic search and real-time event processing.

Developed key features including an elastic search cluster for fuzzy searching, a NestJS micro-service for processing CDC database events, and a pseudo-liveliness check using Google ML Kit and Amazon Rekognition.

FlutterNestJSElasticsearchNeo4jGoogle ML KitAWS Rekognition
LLM-Powered Events Generator
In-house LLM-powered events generator deployed on Microsoft Azure.

Implemented the authentication layer and integrated various Azure services for scalability and insights. Utilized Azure OpenAI and Cosmos DB.

AzureEntra IDCosmos DBOpenAIDocker
Kafka Connect Replication
Data pipeline replication from PostgreSQL to Neo4j with semantic relationship mapping.

Designed and deployed a Kafka Connect pipeline. Used Debezium for real-time capture and Single Message Transformations (SMT) for dynamic data enrichment.

JavaKafkaDebeziumPostgreSQLNeo4jGradle
Basic Go Chat Server & Client
A simple chat server implemented in Go using Channels and Goroutines.

Developed a basic chat server and client in Go, utilizing Channels and Goroutines for concurrent message handling.

Go

Work Experience

My professional journey and key achievements.

Lead Software Engineer

Pacaya International

Feb 2025 – Feb 2026
  • Led a 3-person engineering team: managed sprint planning, feature breakdowns, code quality standards and peer programming guidance.
  • Built a Kafka-based CDC pipeline replicating PostgreSQL data into Neo4j for multi-degree relationship queries. Managed schema evolution and semantic relationship mapping via on-premise Schema Registry and Kafka connectors respectively.
  • Developed an Elasticsearch-backed search engine to replace Postgres FTS, optimizing tokenization and fuzzy-matching logic, resulting in a 40% improvement in search relevance based on internal search analytics.
  • Integrated Microsoft Entra ID for an LLM-powered internal event generation tool, implementing OAuth using tokens for internal micro-services and Role-Based Access Control when collaborating with external consults.

Technical Engineer

Pacaya International

July 2023 – Feb 2025
  • Engineered a cross-platform mobile application (Android/iOS) using Flutter, achieving a milestone of 10,000+ registered users with ~1,000 monthly active users (MAU).
  • Built hybrid liveness detection using Google ML Kit (on-device) and Amazon Rekognition (cloud-side), reducing spoofing attempts by ~75%.
  • Owned the automated deployment of Docker and CI/CD workflows, reducing deployment times from 20 minutes to ~5 minutes.
  • Implemented a Stripe-integrated payment infrastructure to facilitate platform monetization and automated fee processing.

Software Developer

Stima Mobility

September 2023 - April 2024
  • Built a battery temperature analytics platform for Stima Mobility, a company that recharges and sells electric motorcycle batteries.
  • Identified and implemented the machine learning model to predict battery health and temperatures for analysis and anomaly detection.
  • Owned the end-to-end deployment of the model as a service using FastAPI and Docker, exposing an API for the frontend dashboard application to consume.
  • The research was significant in identifying patterns and anomalies in battery temperatures, which helped in optimizing the battery charging process and reducing battery degradation.

Technical Skills

Technologies and tools I work with.

Languages

JavaGoRustDartTypeScriptJavaScript

Frameworks & Databases

NestJSFlutterPostgreSQLFirebaseMongoDBMySQLMariaDBNeo4jRedis

Cloud & DevOps

AWSGoogle CloudAzureDockerKafka ConnectDebeziumGradleFastlaneGitlab Runners