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Keegan Frieslaar

Full-Stack Software Engineer

Cape Town, South Africa

Summary

Self-taught full-stack engineer with 8+ years building and operating web and cloud systems. I currently build MSA Grid at Safety iO (MSA Safety, NYSE: MSA) — a safety-critical connected-safety platform — across Angular front-ends, Node/TypeScript APIs and the AWS serverless infrastructure underneath them. I work daily with distributed teams across Germany and the US, mentor engineers and own services in production.

Experience

  1. Software Engineer · Safety iO (MSA Safety (NYSE: MSA))

    Mar 2023 — Present · Cape Town, South Africa

    • Build and operate MSA Grid end to end — Angular front-end, Node/TypeScript REST APIs and AWS infrastructure — for a safety-critical platform used worldwide, where top customers run fleets of 300–3,000 gas detectors and reliability protects workers in hazardous environments.
    • Own and operate production AWS serverless infrastructure using Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB and RDS/PostgreSQL, scaling horizontally with concurrent demand.
    • Define infrastructure as code with Ansible-driven CloudFormation, and maintain automated Bitbucket Pipelines and Jenkins delivery promoting builds through demo, staging and production.
    • Maintain ~90% test coverage across unit, integration and end-to-end suites with Jest, Testing Library and Playwright, supporting weekly production releases.
    • Added an AI pull-request reviewer to CI that tracks reviewed commit hashes and leaves markers so it only reviews new changes, and halved engineer onboarding from 2 days to 1 by overhauling developer documentation.
    • Instrument services with CloudWatch and Datadog, routing production alerts to on-call channels.
    • Diagnosed and resolved a production outage in which a high-frequency polling endpoint saturated an RDS cluster, restoring stability through targeted database indexing.
    • Mentored 13+ engineers and review code daily.
    • Deliver internationalised interfaces with i18next for a globally deployed product.

    Tech: TypeScript, Angular, NGRX, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, RDS, CloudFormation, Ansible, Jenkins, Docker, Datadog, CloudWatch, Jest, Playwright

  2. Software Engineer · Tenacious Digital

    Jul 2018 — Mar 2023 · Cape Town, South Africa

    • Owned the React front-end of Xago, Africa's first XRP (Ripple) digital asset exchange — building real-time trading charts, Swagger-driven API integration and search against a regulated financial platform with 5,000+ registered users and R4.6 billion in trading volume, still live in production today.
    • Built a customer-facing e-commerce platform for Masterparts, enabling online purchasing across a catalogue of 60,000 active line items and now handling 10,000–15,000 orders a month.
    • Promoted from intern to junior to mid-level engineer, leading a team of 3 and mentoring junior engineers.
    • Introduced code reviews, a testing pyramid with Testing Library, CI and automated deployments across client projects.

    Tech: React, JavaScript, Node.js, MongoDB, REST APIs, Docker, Testing Library

Selected projects

Skills

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL
Front-end
Angular, NGRX, React, i18next
Back-end
Node.js, REST API design, OpenAPI / Swagger
Data
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB
Cloud & infrastructure
AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, CloudFormation, Ansible, S3 / CloudFront
Testing
Jest, Testing Library, Playwright
Delivery & operations
Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Docker, Datadog, CloudWatch, Linux
AI
Amazon Bedrock, LLM agents & tool calling, AI-assisted engineering

Education

  • Software Development Bootcamp · Life Choices Academy2017 — 2018Software Engineering Certificate · 12 months full-time: HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python and Git.
  • National Senior Certificate (Matric) · Bergvliet High School2012 — 2016