About
I build software and AI systems that take manual work off people's desks. I lead the small in-house tech team at LnP Beyond Legal, a Johannesburg law firm, where we design, build and run the firm's internal software with one goal: automating repetitive work to give lawyers back billable hours.
Experience
Software & AI Engineer, LnP Beyond Legal
Lead the firm's small in-house tech team, owning its software, AI and infrastructure from architecture to production.
Legal AI platform
- Architected and shipped the firm's agentic legal assistant, used daily by all directors. It runs on an agent harness with custom tools and skills for drafting from the firm's own templates, editing Word documents and working through PDFs, saving directors hours of drafting each week.
- Built a RAG knowledge library of thousands of legal documents, including textbooks, legislation and case law, OCR'd, chunked, embedded and indexed for semantic search in a vector store. The agent is integrated with it, retrieving the relevant legislation, case law and authorities for the work in hand.
- Designed sub-agent delegation for long documents: large inputs are worked through in isolated contexts and only condensed findings return to the main agent, keeping answers grounded and within context limits.
- Kept outputs grounded in the firm's own sources through retrieval and careful prompt and context engineering, so drafts are built on real authorities rather than the model's memory.
Workflow automation
- Built a secure FICA compliance portal where clients upload their documents, with automated reminders, validity checks and risk evaluation, removing hours of manual compliance work from lawyers each week.
- Automated HR onboarding end to end: offer letters, employment contracts, approval routing and notifications to the relevant departments, saving time on every new hire.
Infrastructure
- Run the firm's on-premises production environment: a server at the office hosting every application and database, behind a reverse proxy with SSL, with managed background services, self-hosted source control and CI/CD pipelines. Client data stays on firm-controlled hardware.
- Handle the networking, port forwarding, maintenance and deployments that keep it all running.
Leadership
- Run daily stand-ups, set priorities with the directors, and work with legal and technical stakeholders to turn their needs into shipped software, sharing progress and proposing solutions along the way.
Software Developer Intern, Libex
Placed at Libex through the Wits Afretec Internship Programme, a learning-focused placement where I built frontend and backend features with React and Express.js.
Computer Science Academic Tutor, Wits University
Tutored 200+ first- and second-year students in data structures and algorithms.
Projects
Chatbotz, co-founder & engineer
A no-code SaaS that lets any business add an AI chatbot to its website in minutes. It scrapes the customer's site, answers from that content using retrieval-augmented generation, and styles the widget to match their brand. I co-built the pipeline and the full commercial loop: billing, free trials, live preview and onboarding.
Volunteering
Web Developer, Women in Procurement SA
Maintain the organisation's website and support registration, ticketing and live updates for the annual WIP Summit.
Education
BSc Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand
- Wits University Entrance Scholarship
- Huawei Bursary Award (2024)
Skills
- AI engineering: agent harnesses, tool and skill design, RAG, semantic search, embeddings, OCR pipelines, sub-agent orchestration, prompt and context engineering
- AI tools: OpenAI API and embeddings, ChromaDB, LangChain, Ollama, OpenCode
- Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C#, SQL
- Web: React, Next.js, Node.js, Express
- Data: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Supabase
- Infrastructure: Windows Server, WSL, Nginx, NSSM, Gitea Actions, CI/CD, Git, Azure, Firebase, Vercel
- Automation: Power Automate, PowerApps, n8n