Engineering leader — platform modernisation, payments, and production AI. Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I take on systems that are failing — inherited, over-costed, or a decade deep into their technical debt — and make them dependable without stopping delivery to do it.

Now — Fractional CTO at ZLAN, a vertical streaming platform for Myanmar and Thailand. I own engineering end to end: architecture, delivery, security, infrastructure and cost.

Before — Platform modernisation at Kaidee, Thailand's largest online classifieds marketplace. Three years at Wave Money, Myanmar's first licensed and largest mobile financial services provider, where I owned the web platform estate and moved from leading the web team into the architecture group.

• Languages — Go, PHP (Laravel), TypeScript, Dart/Flutter, Python
• Architecture — platform migration, change data capture, API and gateway design, domain-driven services, modular monoliths
• Domains — payments and payment gateways, regulated KYC, mobile financial services, marketplaces, streaming
• AI — production LLM integration, MCP servers and tooling for agents, retrieval systems and evaluation

My delivery is AI-assisted, and I invest in the guardrails that make that safe: architectural boundaries enforced by linter, import-direction and file-size gates in CI, type checks that fail the container build, and conformance suites that validate code against the live database schema.

The principle I work to: the system that is allowed to guess does the guessing; the system that has to be right stays deterministic.

Most of my current work lives in private repositories, so the contribution graph tells more of the story than the public repo list does. Happy to walk through architecture and code in conversation.

• Writing and case studies — burmese.dev
• Mentoring — Top 1% on ADPList, 100+ engineers
• Contact — johnthelinux@gmail.com · LinkedIn