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)
Some of my work is on proprietary technology that I can't name publicly. Broadly, it covers areas like security and automated tracking. I'm happy to talk about it in more detail on a call.
Get in touch or email pd.van.lill@gmail.com
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. More at bluesky-consulting.pages.dev.
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.