About Me
Reinhardt van Rooyen
Engineering executive with 18+ years building scalable cloud and AI-driven platforms across enterprise and high-growth environments. Based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Currently Director of Engineering at CoEditor. Previously Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leading the EC2 Control Plane, AWS Management Console, and Generative AI initiatives.
Core Expertise
Deep hands-on systems architecture combined with proven leadership of cross-functional engineering organizations.
AI Platform Strategy
Custom LLM agentic development, RAG architectures, AWS Bedrock & SageMaker. Built LLM-powered EC2 instance discovery agent achieving 95%+ accuracy.
Distributed Systems
Mission-critical cloud infrastructure at AWS scale — EC2 Control Plane, high-availability distributed systems, multi-region deployments.
Engineering Leadership
Led multi-disciplinary teams across three domains at AWS. P&L oversight, strategic hiring, mentorship, and promotion of senior technical talent.
Cloud Architecture
Multi-cloud strategy across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Cloud cost optimization, platform engineering, and large-scale platform modernization.
DevOps & SRE
Established multi-region automated CI/CD pipelines reducing deployment friction by 70%. Managed 99.95%+ uptime SLAs.
Product & Revenue
Owned AWS Management Console generating $430M+ annual revenue. Led $100M+ ARR cross-org AWS Marketplace integration.
Experience
Director of Engineering — CoEditor
2026 – Present
Executive leadership of four cross-functional engineering teams, defining the technical vision and architectural standards for a next-generation AI-integrated publishing platform.AI Strategy & Execution
Spearheaded tiered AI ecosystem including automated customer support agents and high-accuracy moderation systems using LLMs.
Scalable Architecture
Designed highly distributed social networking and commenting architecture ensuring low-latency performance for large-scale user engagement.
FinTech Integration
Architected and deployed custom CRM with deep Stripe integration, scaling to support 120,000+ active subscribers.
Experience
Software Development Manager — Amazon Web Services
2020 – 2025
Strategic leadership of mission-critical engineering teams across the core EC2 Control Plane, AWS Management Console, and Generative AI initiatives.EC2 Control Plane
Directed the mission-critical EC2 Control Plane Capacity team, ensuring high availability and scalability for one of the world's largest distributed systems.
AWS Console & Revenue
Owned the global AWS Management Console experience, directly generating $430M+ in annual revenue and serving over 1M unique weekly customers.
Generative AI Innovation
Spearheaded design and deployment of an LLM-powered EC2 instance discovery agent using AWS Bedrock, achieving 95%+ accuracy.
Technology
Technical Skills
TypeScript · JavaScript · Python · Java · Kotlin
AWS (EC2, Bedrock, SageMaker) · Azure · GCP
AI Agent Systems · RAG Architectures · Custom LLM Development · AWS Bedrock
Distributed Systems · Microservices · Event-driven · Multi-cloud
CI/CD Pipelines · Kubernetes · Terraform · SRE Practices
Technical Strategy · P&L Oversight · Strategic Roadmapping · Engineering Culture
Education
University of Cape Town
MSc Computer Science
Thesis: A Transaction Assurance Framework For Web Services (2005–2007)
BSc (Hons) Information Technology
University of Cape Town (2004)
BSc Information Technology
University of Cape Town (2001–2003)
TOGAF Certified
The Open Group — Enterprise Architecture Framework (2007)
Get in touch
Available for senior engineering leadership roles, advisory engagements, and consulting on cloud architecture and AI platform strategy.
reinhardt@rvit.co.za