Sharif Ndlovu

Software Developer and AWS Solutions Architect specialising in production Django systems on AWS. Track record of delivering mission-critical government and commercial platforms that are live in production — a nationwide land-use management system for CoGHSTA, Mpumalanga, and a multitenant citizen-services platform for the Office of the Premier, Mpumalanga, serving ten provincial departments.

Strengths across the full stack: Django/DRF, event-driven architecture (Celery, RabbitMQ, SQS), and end-to-end AWS infrastructure owned and operated across QA, UAT, and Production environments.

Software Developer & Cloud Architect at DevBridge (Independent Practice) (2021-01 – Present)

Software Developer & Cloud Architect at DevBridge (Independent Practice) (2021-01 – Present)

Livi (Livilemphakatsi) — Multi-Tenant Citizen-Services Platform Live in production. Multi-tier government case-management platform for the Office of the Premier, Mpumalanga. Citizens submit cases via web and mobile; ten provincial departments resolve them through branded backoffice portals.

• Subdomain multi-tenancy — one Django application serving 10 departments across 30 subdomains, with isolated auth and per-department theming via custom middleware.
• Unified case ingestion — web and mobile submissions normalised into a single queue; status-driven case model (NEW → IN_PROGRESS → RESOLVED).
• SLA engine — Celery Beat with SQS/RabbitMQ polling and automatic escalation on breach; Amazon MQ with 12 domain-partitioned queues.
• Queue migration — migrated SQS → RabbitMQ (AMQP/pika) mid-project; rebuilt payload schemas, idempotency keys, and audit tables for the new transport.
• Realtime & media — Server-Sent-Events chat over async Daphne with Redis pub/sub; AWS Rekognition gating inbound media for moderation.
• Built Django REST Framework API with token authentication for mobile-app integration; deployed on ECS Fargate via CloudFormation.

Software Developer & Cloud Architect at DevBridge (Independent Practice) (2021-01 – Present)

e-PGLUM — Electronic Planning & Land-Use Management Live — epglum.co.za. Nationwide land development and building-plan application system serving South African municipalities. Live for CoGHSTA, Mpumalanga; confirmed live by Thembisile Hani Local Municipality public notice, March 2026. Owned the full AWS infrastructure across three environments (QA, UAT, Production) within a team of seven.

• Configurable workflow engine — database-modelled stage transitions via Django signals across a 96-form government codebase; Python mixins for rapid form assembly.
• Full AWS environment — VPCs, private-subnet RDS (PostGIS), ElastiCache, ECS Fargate, ALB, S3/EFS, Route 53, ACM, and AWS WAF tuned for production traffic.
• Async document pipeline — Celery-queued S3 uploads with presigned retrieval; tuned CloudFront → ALB → Gunicorn timeouts for 20 MB+ uploads.
• Nightly statistics pipeline — Celery Beat aggregation of submissions and user activity into structured RabbitMQ payloads; Excel & PDF reporting for analytics.
• Migrated infrastructure from AWS Copilot CLI to standalone CloudFormation with DRY bash scripts ahead of Copilot EOL.

Software Developer & Cloud Architect at DevBridge (Independent Practice) (2021-01 – Present)

The Workplace Basics — Django Commerce & Publishing Platform. Django e-commerce and publishing platform for public-sector educational content. Became the technical foundation for every system that followed.

• Paystack integration — full payment lifecycle from first principles (charge.success, invoice.payment_failed, subscription.disable) with HMAC-SHA512 webhook verification.
• Tiered subscriptions — free/premium access gates with JWT-backed session tokens; digital marketplace and newsletter system.
• AWS S3 media — presigned URLs, lifecycle policies, Pillow thumbnails; ASGI/Django Channels for async and real-time features.
• Celery + Redis async dispatch with Papertrail log aggregation; Dockerised via Docker Compose.

Software Developer & Cloud Architect at DevBridge (Independent Practice) (2021-01 – Present)

Community Web Modernization — DevBridge Social Programme. Annual pro-bono initiative replacing outdated, insecure websites for South African community organisations — estates, schools, churches, NGOs, sports clubs — with fast, secure static sites. 6 live sites (pro-bono)

• Static architecture with no server runtime or database attack surface; Cloudflare edge CDN, automatic HTTPS, and DDoS protection.
• Git-based push-to-live deployment; full institutional source-ownership handover with no vendor lock-in.

Short Course in Programming Languages & Artificial Intelligence – University of Pretoria (2025-01 – 2025-06)

BSc in Computer & Application Development – Varsity College (2021-01 – 2023-12)

High School in IT & Computer Science – Abbotts College