Principal Engineer

Andile Jaden Mbele.

Systems Engineer.
Backend, infrastructure, data & DevOps.

I turn recurring engineering work into platforms: the systems, automation, guardrails, and observability that help teams ship faster without trading away reliability. I do that at ZimWorx, lead engineering at Vectra Dynamics and Optimeer Labs, and volunteer as a computer science instructor at Emzini We Code.

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Self-taught, I love engineering, code, coffee, data & rockets

At ZimWorx: 37 ECS services · 40+ running tasks · 125 CloudWatch alarms · 4 AWS regions.
50+ production repositories maintained · Top 0.5% on Git Wrapped 2025.

GitHub LinkedIn Résumé PDF

Experience

Aug 2025 — Present

ZimWorx

Senior Software Engineer → Principal Engineer

Joined as a Senior Software Engineer and was promoted to Principal Engineer in August 2026. Operate a four-region AWS platform spanning 37 ECS services, 15+ running EC2 instances, 4 RDS databases, and 13 Lambda functions. Maintain 50+ production repositories and build the deployment, security, inventory, and alerting automation around them.

Oct 2025 — Jun 2026

ExactNav

Full-stack Software Engineer · California, USA

Built fintech software for private equity and venture capital fund administration, turning complex investment, banking, accounting, and reporting requirements into dependable workflows. Delivered capital calls and distributions, portfolio accounting, Plaid-powered bank synchronization, and client-ready PDF and Excel financial statements.

2022 — 2025

District 4 Labs

Data Engineer

Built Python ETL and parsing systems that transformed large, irregular SQL, JSON, CSV, XML, and spreadsheet datasets into analysis-ready records. Engineered streaming and concurrent processing, encoding recovery, schema normalization, column-cleaning, and table-merging workflows for data too messy or large for off-the-shelf tools.

2024

Solugrowth

Lead Software Engineer

Software for evaluating and ranking suppliers.

2020 — 2021

First Source Technology

Software Engineer Intern → Lead Software Developer

Built NLP systems for COVID-19 public awareness in the tourist town of Victoria Falls—the applied AI work that shaped my long-term focus on natural language systems. Promoted from intern to Lead Software Developer in February 2021.

Entrepreneurship & innovation

2023 — Present

Vectra Dynamics

Lead Software Engineer

Building Lumina, Rent A Room, and products for African markets.

Current

Optimeer Labs

Co-founder · Lead Engineer

HR and automation software for BPOs, finance, and healthcare, licensed to boutique firms.

Community contributions

2020 — Present

Emzini We Code

Volunteer · Teaching Assistant → Co-Instructor

Seasonal volunteer teaching CS7: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Started as a teaching assistant and now return as a co-instructor to help more students discover computer science.