Director of Technology
Ringier SA is a delivery centre for Ringier AG Switzerland, building multi-tenanted platforms at scale. Our portfolio spans marketplaces in Property, Jobs, and General Classifieds across Africa and CEE, sports media platforms across Europe, Africa and South America, and specialized SaaS products used both internally and externally.
I lead the technology organisation here, the strategy, the architecture, and the people behind it all. We're deep into an AI transformation right now, rethinking how our teams build software and seeing real gains from agentic-first development workflows.
The move from building software to leading people isn't one most engineers chase, but I've found real depth and fulfilment in growing people, shaping teams, and building something bigger than code. Equipping people to do their best work and surrounding myself with people smarter than I am is a privilege and a responsibility I don't take for granted.
Responsibilities
- Strategic leadership of the technology organisation, including technical direction, architecture oversight, and long-term roadmap
- Engineering recruitment, performance management, and budget allocation across the department
- Representing our engineering teams externally and at group level across the broader Ringier network
- Keeping one hand in the code and one in the boardroom, staying active as a developer while leading at a strategic level
- Championing agentic-first development and helping teams find practical ways to adopt it
Learnings & Highlights
- Delivered dozens of platform migration projects, onboarding new marketplaces and tenants onto CUBE
- Launched sports media frontends and APIs built to handle massive scale with near-instant ramp-up, surviving unpredictable traffic spikes without breaking a sweat
- Seeing developers go from sceptics to advocates of agentic workflows, delivering real impact and genuine excitement across the teams
- TRAC (Tech Retreat and Conference), our annual event built around developing culture, sharing strategy, and getting the team connected in person
Head of Engineering
Promoted to lead the engineering department of the new organisation, owning delivery, team structure, and technical standards across all marketplace products.
Responsibilities
- Technical lead on project and platform delivery and maintenance
- Forming new teams, leading technical recruitment and performance management
- Solutions architecture
Learnings & Highlights
- Part of the initial formation of Ringier SA, as we broke the Product and Tech team out into a standalone business for wider delivery into the global group
- Expanding into South East Asia with a Property marketplace in Vietnam and a Jobs marketplace in Myanmar
Head of Technology
When Google announced Core Web Vitals, confusion reigned supreme. No tools existed to unify, monitor, and guide decisions on how teams were tracking against the goal of getting green. I architected and built the initial proof of concept with a small team over a few weeks. It grew into a full platform, solving a fundamental problem of practical and useful CWV visibility in ways that still make an impact today.
We went from waiting 28 days for full impact analysis of changes down to 8 minutes, and managed to match Google's official scoring with 98% accuracy. Due to its ease of adoption and significant value add, it was rolled out extensively within our group and to external partners. Active development has stopped, but the platform is still in daily use and the data continues to deliver wins.
Learnings & Highlights
- Hitting the first billion requests ingested
Group Engineering CTO
ROAM (Ringier One Africa Media) is the operating umbrella company for all of the marketplace powerhouses in East and West Africa, formed by combining Ringier's African marketplace portfolio with One Africa Media's. National and regional leading brands like BrighterMonday and Jobberman (Jobs), Cheki (Cars), BuyRentKenya and MaMaison (Property), and Pigiame, Expat-Dakar and Qefira (Horizontals) all empowered millions of Africans to make their next big move in life.
Duplication of effort and divergent strategies were challenging our marketplaces teams. I started and led Group Engineering to get alignment, reusability, and impact from shared tech and more intentional R&D.
Responsibilities
- Solutions architecture and development lead
- Team and stakeholder management
- R&D and alignment across the teams
Learnings & Highlights
- Forming my first full tech team from scratch
Senior Developer
Focused on the Jobs platforms in East and West Africa, primarily BrighterMonday and Jobberman. Feature development, bug fixes, and performance optimisations across the stack.
Co-founder & Developer
Five years fully self-employed alongside my wife. We built bespoke tooling and projects for clients and ourselves, while building out a social media content creation and photography practice.
Learnings & Highlights
- Learning entrepreneurship, business development, and customer engagement the hard way
- Photographing across three continents, documenting personal and meaningful human moments
- Picking up Laravel, which became the foundation of everything that followed
PHP Developer
M2North is a market leader in bespoke EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) integration and efficient electronic distribution of business documents. They cover the full Order to Cash and Procure to Pay cycle, empowering multiple industries to do business faster and with more confidence.
I worked on integrations spanning mining (Lonmin Platinum, De Beers, Debswana, Impala Platinum), petrochemical (Engen Petroleum), FMCG (Tedelex Trading, Pick n Pay, Makro, Mass Stores), agriculture (Senwes, Kaap Agri, Afgri, NWK), manufacturing (Kansai Plascon, Saint-Gobain, Usabco), and many more.
Education
BSc Computer Science
Incomplete. Completed 2nd year Computer Science modules.
Matric
Completed with multiple distinctions and awards for Computer Science.