Senior Software Engineer & SaaS Builder — Pretoria, South Africa
I build software that works in production: SaaS products, AI automation and voice AI.
I'm Pieter-Daniel van Lill, though most people call me PD. I'm a software engineer in Pretoria and I've been building software professionally for over ten years.
I've worked across e-commerce logistics, sports betting, home services, e-learning and insurance. Lately most of my work is AI: voice bots that answer the phone, pipelines that let language models handle real business processes, and the integrations that hold it all together.
I like owning a problem from start to finish, including the part where it has to keep running after launch. Since 2020 I've also run my own company, Bluesky Consulting, and through it I take on contract work and build my own SaaS products on the side.
Backend services, APIs and the data behind them. I've worked on distributed systems, event streaming and graph-based routing, plus plenty of ordinary CRUD.
I take products from idea to paying customers and users, covering auth, billing, dashboards, deploys and everything in between.
I put language models into real workflows: extraction, classification and decision steps, with the retries, logging and human checks that production needs.
Voice bots and call automation, plus integrations with contact-centre platforms such as Genesys and Five9, and tooling that tests and analyses calls end to end.
A real-time multiplayer classroom game that teaches tax to University of Pretoria students. It has an instructor console, play on phones and live class stats.
Vue · Convex
The website and online education platform with payments for Gymnastics South Africa, built and maintained since 2020.
Vue · Firebase · Angular
Real-time mapping and route tools for EVE Online players, built on the game's public API. My own side project.
Vue · Node · Nuxt · Tauri · Python
github.com/NoxideLive/eve_graph_traversal (route-finding proof of concept)
Voice and telephony AI for insurance customers. I build integrations with Genesys, Five9 and Let's Dial, LLM automation pipelines, and a business-rules engine for outbound dialling. I also built an internal tool that places and drives test calls, then analyses them with live text-to-speech and transcription.
Python · FastAPI · Vue · Go · Docker · AWS · Azure · GCP
My own company, which uses whatever stack the job needs. Work has included a tax-based learning game for the University of Pretoria, websites and products for Gymnastics SA, ad hoc client projects and my own SaaS side projects.
Front end and integrations for insurance voice bots, including the dashboard and the system that manages the models behind the bots.
Python · FastAPI · Vue · Docker · AWS · Azure · GCP
Led the frontend team of five, building a student information system, a learning management system and the learner-facing frontend.
JavaScript · PHP · Vue · Laravel
Payments, booking and the mobile app for a home-services platform.
Python · Django · Celery · React · Next.js · React Native · Flutter · AWS
Worked on a distributed data system for market pricing and tracked down and fixed a hard race condition in it.
C# · .NET Core · Scala · Kafka · RabbitMQ · Redis · Kubernetes
Built graph-based delivery routing on PostgreSQL (pgRouting) and worked on the delivery options API rewrite on JanusGraph/Gremlin and Cassandra.
Scala · Akka · Play · Kafka · PostgreSQL · Cassandra
Built order-fulfilment dashboards in QlikView.
IT, CTU Training Solutions (2012 – 2014) · Microsoft MCSD (2013) · Microsoft MCSE: Business Intelligence (2015)
I take on work as a contractor through my company, Bluesky Consulting. That covers backend and full-stack engineering, AI automation and integrations, voice AI, and taking a SaaS product from idea to launch.
I'm based in Pretoria and I mostly work remotely, with teams anywhere.