~/$ whoami
Sipho Omotola Mahlangu
I design event-driven backends and AI-native systems — and keep them boring in production.
//About
Senior Full Stack Engineer with 10+ years designing and operating high-throughput, distributed systems in cloud-native environments.
I specialise in event-driven architectures, real-time data platforms, and scalable backend systems — built reliably, and kept boring in production.
Currently focused on AI-enabled applications and agentic systems: combining large language models, knowledge-driven workflows, and solid backend platforms into software that can reason about its work.
//Skills
$ Backend & Systems
$ AI Engineering
$ Cloud & Infrastructure
$ Data & Storage
$ Frontend
//Experience
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Real-time data infrastructure, event-driven microservices
Independent Contract Engineer
Full-stack products for startups and SMEs, end-to-end ownership
Data Science Lecturer
Applied data science, mentored 100+ students
Software Developer
Full-stack platforms and self-managed infrastructure
Full history on LinkedIn — or get in touch to request a CV.
//Projects
BYO Pulse
byopulse.com →
Bulawayo’s civic utility: official city information, aggregated so a resident can answer Where do I go? Who do I call? How do I do this? What’s happening nearby? Fast on any phone, without an account: 800+ mapped places, council notices, events, and per-suburb pages.
- Grounded agent: Ask Byo answers only from the site’s own sourced corpus. Out-of-corpus questions get a refusal that routes back to search, never a guess; answers are link-free by design, with sources rendered as verifiable chips.
- Curated pipeline: Daily scrapers open refresh PRs, LLM enrichment passes machine gates and golden-case evals in CI, community submissions wait for human moderation, and every surface shows its source and checked date.
uVelaphi
uvelaphi.com →
The Digital Ancestor: the customs of a continent, recorded for a generation raised between worlds. 1,100+ entries across customs, names, dishes, and garments answer what to do, when, with whom, and above all why.
- Labelled by trust: Every entry shows how far it has been verified, from an AI-aggregated first draft, to community-affirmed, to elder-verified. A machine draft never poses as settled knowledge, and the conversational Ask the Elder ships as a clearly marked preview.
- Built for the diaspora: Multiple countries and peoples are the point, not the exception. A guided path narrows a continent of customs down to your moment, and a Name Decoder reads what any African name carries.
Client builds
Design-led marketing sites and storefronts for studios, boutiques, and clinics, delivered end to end: architecture, build, and deploy. Private repositories, public live sites.
- carinapereira.com beauty academy
- lukhanyomdingi.co.za fashion e-commerce
- miraclefertility.de fertility care
- watchdogmedia.co.za film production
//Areas of Interest
AI Engineering & Agentic Systems
Building AI-native software: agentic workflows, retrieval and knowledge graphs, and LLMs wired into real backend systems — with explainability and human oversight designed in from the start.
Distributed Systems & Real-Time Data
Event-driven architectures, streaming pipelines, and the operational discipline that keeps high-throughput systems reliable at scale.
Personal Curiosities
Web3 and decentralised infrastructure, applied statistics, and local-first AI — explored off the clock, occasionally escaping into side projects.
//Education
- BTech in Information Technology
Durban University of Technology — Distinction - ND in Information Technology
Durban University of Technology — Distinction + Merit Award - Certifications
CompTIA A+, Network+, MCTS
//Contact
Open to senior engineering roles, contract work, and collaborations in AI engineering and distributed systems. Recruiters welcome.
