Software architect consultant for AWS, mobile and regulated platforms

Zayin Krige. Remote engagements.

I am an independent software architect consultant with 28 years of professional software development behind me. I am hired to decide how a system should be built, write those decisions down, and stay hands-on long enough to prove they hold in production. I work remotely, through Apex Technology, the consultancy I founded in 2001, and through Apex Technology Enterprises Ltd (UK, London, Companies House 15019510) for international contracting.

What the engagements cover

Event-driven and serverless architecture on AWS

For a health and wearables company I architected an AWS event-driven serverless health-data platform: more than 90 Lambda functions wired with SNS, SQS, DynamoDB and API Gateway, using CQRS-style queue projections, provisioned through Terraform. The design decisions behind it are written up in how to design an event-driven serverless platform on AWS.

Cross-platform mobile architecture

On an edtech and digital-publishing platform I have been technical lead for 12 years, building and maintaining eReader apps across iOS, Android, desktop Electron and NW.js, React Native and Flutter for major international publishers. The desktop reader alone is around 18,500 lines across 49 services, offline-first with DRM and licence management. Choosing between the two dominant cross-platform stacks is covered in Flutter vs React Native in 2026.

Regulated and identity-critical systems

Insurance customer identity: a migration to Microsoft Entra External ID with Yoti identity verification and custom registration and login flows on Azure Functions, through to production and hypercare. Regulated lending: a loan-management platform with month-end general-ledger export and interest-capitalisation reporting. These are the engagements where a software architect consultant earns the fee, because the compliance constraint has to be in the design before the first line of code.

Legacy systems that have outgrown their first design

One database, one server, no tests, one developer who understands it. The work is a migration plan that does not stop feature delivery, and someone accountable for it while it runs.

What you get

• A written target architecture: the stack, the hosting model and the boundaries between systems, with the reasoning recorded so the next developer does not relitigate it.
• An audit of what exists now: code, infrastructure, cloud bill and team, with the three things to fix first.
• A migration or build sequence with dates attached.
• Hands-on delivery. I review pull requests and write code, because an architect who cannot do either cannot hold a team to a standard.

Architect consultant or fractional CTO

They are different engagements. A software architect consultant is accountable for the technical design of a system and the sequence that builds it. A fractional CTO owns that plus hiring, vendor and cost control, team management and technical due diligence. If the gap in your company is people and process rather than system design, read what a fractional CTO does instead. If you need a contractor rather than either, the guide to hiring a contract software developer in South Africa covers vetting and contracts.

Technical range

TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React and React Native; AWS (Lambda, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, CloudWatch) with Terraform; serverless, microservices, event-driven architecture and CQRS; Go; Python; PHP/Laravel; Flutter; Swift/iOS since 2010; Kotlin/Java Android since 2008; Cloudflare Workers; PostgreSQL; OpenAI, Whisper and vision AI; Solidity. Domains delivered across: insurance, fintech, regulated lending, payments, health and biometric data, edtech and publishing, aviation, fleet and fuel, and marketplaces.