Stian Scholtz
Technology Leader · Chief Technology Officer · Full-Stack Software Engineer
Potchefstroom, South Africa · Open to international relocation · +27 76 899 9232 · stian678@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/stian-scholtz · stianscholtz.com
Profile
Technology leader with 8+ years delivering enterprise software for banking, wealth management and national retail clients, and 3+ years as Chief Technology Officer of a software group. Combines hands-on full-stack engineering (PHP/Laravel, Vue/TypeScript, SQL, AWS) with leadership of 10–12-person engineering teams, project scoping, budgeting and client relationship management. Track record of building secure, compliant platforms — payment gateway integrations with mutual TLS, investor reporting systems with automated data pipelines, and real-time commerce applications — and of cutting delivery costs through pragmatic architecture decisions. Seeking an international opportunity with relocation, in either a technology leadership or senior engineering capacity.
Selected achievements
- Reduced delivery costs by over 40% on a high-profile project for one of South Africa's largest banks, and by up to 90% on comparable initiatives, by leading a strategic move from microservices to a leaner monolithic architecture.
- Delivered a national retail commerce platform (customer mobile app plus administration system) end to end — including a certificate-based mutual-TLS payment gateway integration, real-time order and delivery tracking over WebSockets, and sub-second product search.
- Built an investor platform for a wealth management firm featuring automated daily portfolio and statement imports over SFTP, giving clients self-service access to their investment data.
- Modernised legacy technology estates onto current, maintainable stacks and introduced AI-assisted development tooling, measurably improving engineering throughput.
- Recruited, mentored and restructured engineering teams of up to 12 while personally owning client pre-sales, scoping and stakeholder communication.
Professional experience
Chief Technology Officer — Snappi Group of CompaniesDec 2022 – Present
South Africa (remote-first) — software consultancy and product group serving banking, retail and wealth management clients
- Own the group's technology strategy, architecture standards and engineering processes across concurrent client programmes.
- Lead delivery of a multi-store liquor e-commerce platform for a sub-brand of a national retail group: Laravel/PostgreSQL back end, Vue 3 + TypeScript mobile app, FilamentPHP admin, last-mile delivery integration and live order tracking via WebSockets (Laravel Reverb), and Typesense product search.
- Implemented a secure card-payment integration with a South African payment provider using mutual TLS — managing the client certificate lifecycle (DigiCert OV), storing credentials in AWS Secrets Manager, and coordinating sandbox-to-production testing with the provider.
- Designed and operate AWS infrastructure (EC2 ARM64, RDS PostgreSQL, Redis, SQS, S3/CloudFront) provisioned through Laravel Forge, including monitoring, zero-downtime deployment and cost optimisation.
- Delivered an investor app and administration system for a wealth management client, with scheduled daily client synchronisation and SFTP-based portfolio and statement import pipelines.
- Manage client relationships directly — requirements workshops, proposals, fixed-price scoping, status reporting and feedback triage with executive stakeholders.
- Direct recruitment and performance management of a 10–12-person engineering team; mentor engineers through code review and pairing.
Founder & Principal Consultant — Eccentric Technologies (Pty) Ltd2024 – Present
Potchefstroom, South Africa — boutique software consultancy operated alongside the Snappi role
- Deliver fixed-scope platform builds, technical audits and proposals for independent retail and services clients, owning everything from commercial scoping to production deployment.
- Recent engagements include point-of-sale platform proposals, a progressive-web-app commerce build with POS and payment-gateway integration, and digital-signage and notification-channel (WhatsApp Business Platform) solutions.
Senior Software Engineer — fitt TalentSep 2019 – Dec 2022
South Africa
- Delivered projects ranging from marketing websites to AI-integrated enterprise applications, working autonomously under tight deadlines.
- Led and reviewed the work of junior engineers, contributed to their training, and developed shared internal packages.
- Engaged clients directly on requirements and solution design, including database and systems engineering.
Software Engineer — XtrapolateNov 2017 – Sep 2019
South Africa — startup environment
- Lead developer on a substantial client project from an early career stage, mentored directly by the CEO/CTO.
- Promoted to a senior position within the first year as the team scaled.
Technical skills
Languages & frameworks: PHP (Laravel, FilamentPHP), JavaScript/TypeScript (Vue 3, React, Node.js, Astro), Java (Spring Boot), Python, SQL, HTML/CSS (Tailwind)
Data & integration: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, REST APIs, payment gateways (mutual TLS, 3-D Secure flows), SFTP data pipelines, WebSockets, Typesense search
Cloud & DevOps: AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, SQS, Secrets Manager), Laravel Forge, CI/CD, zero-downtime deployment, infrastructure cost optimisation
Security & compliance: Certificate lifecycle management, secrets management, secure integration design, access-scoped multi-tenant administration systems
Leadership & delivery: Team building and mentoring, project scoping and estimation, fixed-price commercial engagement, stakeholder and client management, AI-assisted development practices
Education & languages
BSc Information Technology — North-West University, South Africa2015 – 2017
Languages: English (fluent), Afrikaans (native)
International mobility
South African citizen seeking to relocate internationally with my wife; open to opportunities requiring visa or work-permit sponsorship (e.g. UK Skilled Worker, Channel Islands Employment Permit, EU highly skilled migrant schemes). Comfortable with remote-first onboarding ahead of relocation, and available for interviews across time zones at short notice.