Basic Info

  • Full Name: Jans George Rautenbach
  • FKA: George Rautenbach
  • Fluent Languages: English, Afrikaans
  • Basic understanding: German, Dutch
  • Email: jans (at) rauten.co.za (PGP key)
  • Matrix: @jans:rauten.co.za
  • Current City of Residence: Cape Town
  • Current Status: Working full-time

Education

University of Pretoria

Pretoria | 2021

BSc (Hons) Computer Science; with Distinction. Degree included elective philosophy modules

Research project: Detecting insider threats using an accepted ontology.

University of Cape Town

Cape Town | 2018 - 2020

BSc Computer Science and Philosophy; with Distinction

Internal Awards

  • 2019
    • Certificate of Merit for Second Year Computer Science
    • Top 15% in the Faculty of Science.
  • 2018
    • Certificate of Merit for First Year Computer Science
    • Faculty of Science Scholarship for Second Year
    • Nominated for the Entelect Social Responsiveness Reward
    • Top 15% in the Faculty of Science.
    • Faculty of Science Dean’s Merit List

Tutoring Experience

  • 2019: Tutor for first-year Computer Science courses (CSC1015F and CSC1016S). Includes in-person group tutoring, assignment marking, test invigilation, and test marking.

Involvement

  • 2020
    • Open Mind Society founder & chairperson
    • Developer Student Club tech mentor
    • Philosophy Society regular
    • Developer Society regular
    • Ballroom Dancing Society regular
  • 2019
    • Developer Society Subcom Member
      • Society website development team lead
    • Philosophy Society regular
    • Philosophy course Class Representative (PHI2041S: Great Philosophers)
    • Ikeys Vibe member
  • 2018
    • Developer Society regular

University of Tübingen

Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany | 2020 January (1 mo)

  • Short student exchange: Tübingen-South Africa Programme
  • Academic enrichment focussed on political and moral philosophy.
  • Exposure to German history, art, music, economics, politics, and other cultural aspects.
  • Course on intercultural communication.
  • A1-level German language course

Jan van Riebeeck High School

Cape Town | 2013 - 2017 (5 years)

Grade 12: Student Council Member & Head of the Tech Portfolio

Each matric student council member chose or was assigned a portfolio (a subdivision of the school) for them to manage. Furthermore, each portfolio had the chance to seek members to help run it. The more members the quicker things get done, but the more difficult it becomes to manage people. Portfolio heads are left to make all operational decisions on their own.

My first choice was the Tech Portfolio because, with my combined knowledge and experience, technology was my strongest suit. The portfolio is responsible for providing, setting up and managing the necessary sound and lighting reinforcement for school events. This covers almost literally every event the school hosts (swimming galas, athletics days, interschool rugby matches, plays and cultural performances) as well as a lot of day-to-day operations (weekly hall gatherings and other announcements). The events covered could take up to 2 hours and 6 trained students to set up. Although this was a very specialised task requiring a lot of effort, the real difficulty came in with the live managing of the events’ tech. Live tech management required high-level thinking and quick decision making under stressful circumstances. There was only so much the regular techies could do. When something went wrong during an event, it was entirely up to the live tech managers to devise and implement a solution as quickly as possible. There is nothing an audience hates more than “technical issues”. Because of the large amounts of stress caused, there were very few students that were up to the task of live tech management.

Grade 11: Co-Head of Matric Farewell Committee

The matric farewell committee was a group of 15 learners, elected by their peers basically to organise the matric farewell (the grade above; not our own). In reality, the committee did much more than just the organisation of the huge event. It was also responsible for collecting all the funds necessary (~R150 000). This meant that the committee was in charge of every single for-profit event of the school.

Except for participating in general committee discussion and voting, I was also in charge of all tech-related decisions as well as oversight and execution of sound and lighting management at all Committee-ran events.

Tutoring

Since Grade 9 I have been tutoring various subjects that I excel at, including Mathematics, IT, Business Studies and Accounting, to learners in my grade and lower. The classes are a couple of times per term and I have been told that they really help learners achieve better results in exams.

Internal Awards

  • Grade 12
    • Top in Business Studies
    • Top in IT
    • Academic Colours (80% Avg)
    • 5th Overall Grade Position
  • Grade 11
    • Top in Accounting
    • Top in Business Studies
    • Top in IT
    • Top in Mathematics
    • Full Academic Colours (80% Avg)
    • 6th Overall Grade Position
  • Grade 10
    • Top in Business Studies
    • Full Academic Colours (85% Avg)
    • 5th Overall Grade Position

Work Experience

Electrum Payments

Platforms Engineer

Cape Town | Sept 2023 - Aug 2024 (1 year)

  • Lead an infrastructure project to upgrade 50+ AWS databases from version 5 to version 8 with next to no downtime. The upgrade saved Electrum thousands of dollars in AWS extended support fees, and significantly improved transaction throughput and RDS stability. The project included building automation tools which can be used to automate future database upgrades.
  • Architected, integrated, and maintained the infrastructure for various high-throughput Kafka data pipelines for purposes of reconciliation, monitoring, and business intelligence. Engineered the automated provisioning of Elasticsearch dashboards and alerts for site reliability.
  • Mentored and trained multiple new-starters in the Platforms team, leading them to produce Electrum-standard high-quality software in a matter of months.
  • Started and ran a department-wide engineering initiative for gathering feedback about and improving the Electrum Internal Developer Platform (IDP). The initiative was crucial in prioritising and architecting the Platform Team’s work.
  • Met regularly with the CTO and Platforms Lead to prioritise and architect work on the IDP in accordance with ongoing and planned customer projects as well as developer feedback.
  • Consistently upheld high standards wrt platform quality, usability, user acceptance testing, documentation, and actioning developer feedback. Our IDP allowed for quick and easy onboarding of new customers and services, with “batteries included” features such as self-healing clusters, automated backups, zero-downtime deployments, highly available applications, networking, cronjobs, Kafka events, and databases. Our CI/CD processes allowed devs to deploy their code changes with minimal effort and high trust due to extensive automated testing, patching, and zero-downtime deployments.

Intermediate Software Engineer

Cape Town | Feb - Sept 2023 (7 months)

Contributions:

  • Writing, testing, and deploying spec’d features, and owning said features throughout the entire SDLC.
  • Analysing complex feature solutions in a multi-million SLOC codebase, and overseeing said features’ development throughout the SDLC.
  • Contributing to many internal brainstorming and solution architecture discussions to improve the Electrum code ecosystem, and ensure new solutions will be compatible, supported, and maintainable.
  • Playing the role of Technical Lead for multiple different projects, which entails communicating effectively with project stakeholders (team leads, project managers, and customers) to provide accurate timelines and highlight potential risks early; doing the majority of the project’s solution architecture while keeping engineering stakeholders (senior architects, and other code owners) in the loop; managing project resources and overseeing development of project code throughout the SDLC; and working together with Electrum’s and customers’ business analysts to construct high-level multi-party solutions.
  • Supporting Electrum’s infrastructure and software after hours for multiple week-long shifts per year. This includes being on call at all times after business hours; staying on top of alerts and ensuring all systems are functioning nominally; engaging with customers’ and third parties’ after hours teams to resolve technical issues ASAP after they occur; communicating downtime timeously to customer success staff.
  • Hosting regular internal Engineering meetings with the purpose of disseminating useful information across the entire department. Topics include Electrum-specific tools, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and computer and business ethics.
  • Organising team social events to improve team morale.
  • Mentoring of interns and new hires to ensure a smooth and quick onboarding experience, and also provide effective teach-a-man-to-fish style learning.
  • Organising and participating in university and tech community outreach initiatives. This includes speaking at tech talks hosted by Electrum on various university campuses in the Western Cape, and also helping out with off-site university recruitment events.
  • Lead a 3rd-level engineering support team with the purpose of resolving tickets raised by customers and internal stakeholders. As ticket leader, I did deep-dive investigations into Electrum payment systems and infrastructure, as well as coordinated with customer technical staff in order to effectively resolve production issues from an engineering perspective. Note that this role is rotational.
  • Organised and ran multiple engineering outreach initiatives, including hosting tech talks for technologists in the Cape Town area together with the local Google Dev Group Cape Town chapter. On many of these occasions I was not only involved with organisation, but also delivered presentations as an event speaker.

Internal programs:

  • Electrum Personal Leadership Programme: Run by Leadership Insight South Africa, this multi-month program assists a select grouping of Electrum employees in developing their leadership skills both in and outside the workplace.

Junior Software Engineer

Cape Town | Jan 2022 - Feb 2023 (1 year 1 month)

Responsibilities include:

  • Coding up spec’d Electrum services and plugins
  • Contributing to Electrum’s developer processes
  • Developing interpersonal relationships (yup, that’s in the contract)
  • Analysing the Electrum ecosystem and authoring solution specifications
  • Tech leading multiple customer projects

Displode

Remote | Sept 2021 - Jan 2022 (5 months)

Position: Fullstack Developer

Wrote a substantial portion of the UI code, backend storage schema, and interoperation programming for Displode’s flagship platform, Sundial. Sundial is an orienteering sport management tool used to log the race times of orienteers. The system also includes hardware components, namely energy efficient tag points capable of operating under extreme weather conditions and transmitting data to tags to be captured centrally by the software client running on laptops positioned at the finish line.

Centre for AI Research

Remote | Dec 2020 - Jan 2021 (2 months)

Position: Research Intern

Made major contributions in a small research unit that developed a propositional logic parsing platform (link). The platform was deployed for testing by professors and students in departments Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. The platform formed the basis for multiple research projects into Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in 2021.

HyperionDev

Remote | May 2020 - Jul 2021

Position: Part-time technical consultant

During my time at HyperionDev I have had many dynamic responsibilities, including:

  • Technical content author: writing and reviewing technical guides and tasks on an array of different technical subjects, including version control, containerisation, web development, database architecture, and software engineering best practices.
  • Code reviewer: reviewed student-submitted solutions to technical tasks on various computer science topics.
  • Lecturer: creating lecture content and presenting online lectures for HyperionDev students on various computer science topics.
  • Tech speaker: created and delivered presentations on various cutting-edge tech topics to HyperionDev mentors, lecturers, and general staff.
  • SAQA content aligner: aligned various guides and tasks to comply with SAQA standards.

Electrum Payments (Intern)

Cape Town | June - July 2019 (4 weeks)

Position: Software Engineering Intern

Responsibilities:

  • Creating an API in a remarkably big and sensitive project space.
  • Porting the feature for a legacy system.
  • Writing documentation for both implementations.
  • Managing the progression of my features through the full devops integration lifecycle. (Repo - CI - Static Analysis - RC - Dev testing env - Prod)
  • Daily reporting at standups as well as project presentation.

ACI Worldwide

Cape Town | November 2018 - January 2019 (3 months)

Position: Software Engineering Intern

ACI Worldwide is a massive 40+ year old tech corporation specialising in the payments industry and has a well-established international brand. I was hired as an intern at the Cape Town office for the Summer holidays. Working at ACI was my first in-depth exposure to serious big corporate culture. Bureaucracy, code reviews, programming standards, sprint standups and project managers to report everything to. I was thrown into an old, distributed multi-million LoC project with multiple languages as components, told to figure out how it works and given a list of enhancements to implement. The other employees were helpful, but more than most of the work was mine to bear. None the less, after I was settled in properly, I starting closing tickets at a rapid pace. So much so, I completed my project well before the PM’s ETR. I was asked to join another team and assist them in their tasks until the end of my contract.

The enhancements I did on my originally assigned project have since been released into production and is now running on ACI’s clients’ servers all around the world.

Technologies used: Java, Delphi, Python, Jenkins, Perforce, Angular, Django, SQL Server.

Connect @ 49

Cape Town | October 2018 - December 2018 (3 months)

Position: Private tutor

I tutored at an upmarket private tutoring agency in the Parklands area. The students here have parents with very high standards. The pressure on the local tutors was immense. My tutees did, however, see a solid increase in his marks for the year-end exam.

MWR InfoSecurity

Johannesburg | July 2018 (2 weeks)

Position: Software Engineering Intern

MWR InfoSecurity is an international tech company that specialises in information security. The business is split into two distinct wings: consultancy and development. The former is tasked with attempting to break into a client’s systems and write a report on what features of their system are unsafe. The latter is the creation of the solution to these security threats. I was flown up to their South African headquarters to intern at the development department. The time I spent there got me some great first-hand experience of what it’s like to work in the information security industry.

The project I was tasked with did not directly involve working on MWR’s systems, however, it did focus a lot on technologies used in the industry. Because of the non-disclosure agreement they had me sign, I cannot disclose what exactly my project entailed. I can, however, say that I learned much more than I was expecting to and my time there feels like the equivalent of passing a course.

Technologies used: NoSQL, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Python, Sentiment Analysis, Linux Server

ABSA Aliens

Cape Town | Jun 2018 (2 weeks)

Position: Software Engineering Mentee I interned at ABSA’s tech innovation wing, called Aliens. The interns were split into teams and each assigned the task to come up with an idea and implement it within the two weeks. My team worked on a service called Clubeau. The service had a RESTful API, web client and Android client, all with different use cases. Implementing the idea was a challenging piece of work, but in the end, we finished a fully functioning proof of concept.

During the internship, the team did morningly standups and extensively used git and Trello to manage Clubeau’s progress. Every member was to some degree involved in every aspect of Clubeau, but I was for the most part responsible for the API.

Technologies used: Android, Java, PHP, RESTful API, Linux Server, Agile Development

SkillUp Tutors

Cape Town | Mar 2018 - December 2018 (10 months)

Position: Private tutor

I regularly tutored via a service called SkillUp. Tutors are allowed to register their services (after a vetting process and interview for determining competence by a SkillUp representative). Students can then browse through tutors and pick the one they feel most comfortable with. I very quickly gained quite a few students and filled up my timetable.

I mostly tutored Matric Mathematics and university-level Computer Science.

UberEats

Cape Town | Oct 2017 - Feb 2018 (5 months)

Position: Independent driver

During my Matric December holiday, I worked part-time delivering food through UberEats. The job entailed driving to various restaurants in Cape Town, making a pickup and delivering to customers. The job had quite some pressure as both the restaurant and customer could live-track me while driving. No slacking allowed.

Other

  • DJ’s Assistant at DJ Dean SA (Sept 2016) - During the Jan van Riebeeck High’s Matric Farewell in The Bay Hotel on the 29th September 2016, I was assistant to the private DJ, Dean Hewitt. This involved help with setup of sound and lighting equipment as well as live management of the dance performers’ lighting. The event in its entirety was a huge success and claimed to be the best in years by many.

  • Job Shadowing at Old Mutual South Africa (Jun 2016) - A very insightful day spent at OMSA’s headquarters. I met with many of the staff and learned a lot about what exactly goes on in Old Mutual and how the employees work together to get jobs done. In my interviews, I was taught tonnes of information about how exactly every individual employee does what they do and thereby contributes to Old Mutual’s success. It was more than interesting to learn about these people’s lives and I was glad to have made some connections in the process.

  • Bartender for UCT Yacht Club (Mar 2016) - A friend and I got a job to tend a bar at a medium-sized UCT student-organised party. It was a lot of work, moving alcohol, mixing brews and handling cash for over 100 students, but the tips, as well as the experience, was well worth it.

Skills

Technical

Advanced

  • Java & OOP
  • Custom de/serialisation
  • Reflection
  • Parallelisation and concurrency
  • JSVC
  • Maven
  • JOOQ
  • Linux
    • System Administration
    • High performance computing cluster setup and management
  • Containerisation with Docker
  • Python
    • MPI
    • pip
  • SQL & database architecture
    • MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, PostgreSQL
    • Flyway, database migrations
    • Blue-Green deployments
  • RESTful APIs
  • DevOps
    • GitHub Actions
    • GitLab CI/CD
    • Artifactory/Jfrog
    • CircleCI

Moderate

  • DSL programming
    • xtext
    • Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF)
  • Kubernetes
    • Helm Charts
    • Argo CD
    • AWS EKS
  • Digital Forensics
  • Android Development
  • PHP
  • Kotlin
  • Go
  • Web Development
    • Angular CLI
    • ReactJS
    • Redux
    • VueJS
    • Blazor Webassembly
    • Electron
  • XML, XSD and conceptual modelling
  • NoSQL (ElasticSearch, MongoDB)
  • git
  • Cloud IaaS Providers
    • AWS
    • Azure
    • Hetzner
    • Backblaze B2
    • Oracle Cloud

Some experience

  • Delphi
  • Perforce
  • Django
  • ELK stack
  • Artificial Moral Agents (AMA’s)
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Wearable Development
  • SSL Certificate Management
  • Ontology engineering (OWL/RDF/XML)
  • Computer/CPU architecture
  • Ruby
  • R
  • C#

Soft

Standard

  • Clear communication
  • Teamwork, leadership and tactful engagement
  • Problem identification and initiative to solve it
  • Adaptability to new methodologies and approaches when necessary
  • Agile development

Philosophy in the workplace

  • Comprehensive ethical knowledgebase and reasoning ability
  • Concise explanatory ability
  • Intelligible and coherent argumentation
  • Rigorous comprehension of complex ideas and systems
  • Scepticism and curiosity
  • Independent thinking

Other company interest

Offers received and rejected

The following are offers I received from companies and subsequently rejected for either logistical or personal moral apprehensions.

  • Amazon Web Services - internship
  • Skynamo (Subsidiary of Alphawave) - internship
  • SOLIDitech - internship
  • Entelect - internship
  • Digsconnect - software engineering position
  • Matchbox - software engineering position
  • Golden Key Honours Society - membership (2018 and 2019)
  • UCT Google Developer Student Club - club lead position
  • BDO - technology graduate program
  • Dado Agency - Web Developer position
  • Telic Consulting - Security architecture
  • Nedbank - Digital forensics team

Interviews attended

The following are opportunities I interviewed for in person, but was ultimately not accepted for.

  • Allan Gray Orbis - scholarship
  • Boston Consulting Group - internship
  • UCT Science Student Council 2020 - academic chairperson

Certifications

Technical

Musical

  • Rock School Electric Guitar Grade 1
  • UNISA Theory of Music Grade 4

External Awards

Programming Competitions

  • BDO Remote Hackathon 2020: 2nd place in first round
  • Google Hash Code 2020: 3rd place in UCT
  • CHPC Student Cluster Competition 2019: 3rd place in South Africa.
  • ICPC 2019
    • 3rd place in the Cape Town region
    • 5th place in the South Africa region
    • 7th place in the Africa region
  • Standard Bank Technology Impact Challenge 2019: Results not released.
  • Entelect University Cup 2019: Placed 25th out of 73 teams
  • Google Hash Code 2019
    • Placed 51st in South Africa out of about 100 teams.
    • Placed 3800th worldwide out of about 7000 teams.
  • ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest 2018: Achieved: Best UCT team of first-time entrants
  • Entelect University Cup 2018: Achieved: 11th Position out of 61 Teams
  • IITPSA Computer Talent Search 2016: Achieved: Gold Certificate

Other Awards

  • Dado Independent Project Competition 2020: First place
  • UCT SSC Science Got Talent 2020: First place
  • Electrum Bursary: Achieved a full tuition bursary for 3rd year and honours.
  • Die Burger Wiskunde-Kompetisie 2017: Achieved: Top 50 Nationally
  • ATKV Tienertoneel 2017
    • Production placed 4th Nationally
    • Gold Certificate for Lighting Management
    • Gold Certificate for Lighting Design
    • Nomination for Best Handling of Technical Aspects
  • Mentorvennoot NPC Snapspel 2016: Achieved: Champion Entrepreneur School

Media Exposure

Publications

  • Modelling Ethical Theories for Artificial Moral Agents (2019)
    • Supervised by Prof Maria Keet ([blog post](https://keet.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/ digital-assistants-and-amas-with-configurable-ethical-theories/))
    • Affiliated with UCT CS Dept
    • Paper accepted by UCT.
    • Paper accepted for presentation by AI & Ethics in Society conference (New York City, 2020). Unable to attend for logistical reasons.
    • Publicised on arXiv (by Cornell University) - link
    • Published in The Join Ontology Workshops (Vol 2708, Italy, Aug 2020) - link
    • Presented at Robontics 2021 (Bolzano, Italy (virtual))

Personal

Hobbies

Code isn’t all I write. I also run a blog where I discuss philosophical concerns, often relating to technology.

Outside of tech I’m a huge electronic music afficionado and festival fanatic. I also do some amateur DJing - listen to my mixes here.

Open Source

Most of my personal projects are open source. Beyond these, you can follow my open source contributions on my personal kanban board.

Expos, Indabas, Workshops and other learning experiences

  • Ethics Champion Course (The Ethics Institute of South Africa) 2022 - participant
  • UNited hackathon (UCT DevSoc) 2021 - guest solution judge
  • UCT Futures in Health Accelerator Project design workshop series, 2019
  • #BreakTheRules Summer 2019
  • McKinsie & Company Digital: Student workshop 2019 - software design, methodology and presentation
  • Facebook mentorship program 2019 - problem-solving and soft skills required for the software engineering industry
  • #BreakTheRules Winter 2019 - UCT Software internship expo
  • UCT Computer Science tutor and mentor training 2019
  • Deep Learning IndabaX Western Cape 2018
  • #BreakTheRules Summer 2018
  • #BreakTheRules Winter 2018