Last updated: April 2026
Alistair Yan
Backend Engineer · Johannesburg, SA
Computer Engineering graduate from the University of Pretoria, now working as a Senior Backend Engineer at Aruba Networks (HPE). I spend most of my time building distributed systems with Python and Kafka, and I find Infrastructure-as-Code genuinely enjoyable.
Outside work I build things for fun — robots, scrapers, trading algorithms, rabbit feeders with smartphone controls. The common thread is that I like making things that work, and then making them work better.
South African Citizen · Valid Driver's Licence · Valid Passport · English · Afrikaans (competent)
Experience
Building microservices that handle large-scale sensor data — ingestion, segmentation, and routing to customer-configured destinations via Kafka and a custom ETL system.
Led the integration of UXI customer data into the Aruba Central dashboard, coordinating across teams to unify two separate data systems.
Managed the South African Traffic Information System and a bursary management system for the Technical Innovation Hub.
Education
Astounded by the number of destinations I achieved, and still proud of them to this day.
Honours in biomedical engineering focused on cochlear implants. Researched automated creation of person-specific 3D models of the cochlea from CT, CBCT and MRI scan data.
Final year project: designed an elephant collar that recorded infrasonic vocalisations for a year, equipped with GPS and a LORA long-range transceiver. Featured in BBC.
Certifications
Key Project
Architected and delivered an event-driven aggregation system for hierarchical network sensor data, reducing latency from 20s to 2s for the largest enterprise customers.
- ▸ Designed a fragmentation-based data model enabling composable hierarchical queries with real-time reactivity
- ▸ Introduced a signal-driven query pattern for horizontal scalability and efficient event processing
- ▸ Built HotCache — an SSE reverse-proxy with request deduplication and message replay buffering