Bhekani Khumalo

I joined Contentful in 2022 on the billing and audit side. I led the work on organisation-level audit logging, which mostly meant getting services across the platform to agree on one event contract, consolidated billing and usage reporting into a single warehouse-backed system, and fixed a gateway bottleneck that took query times from seconds to milliseconds.

In 2025 I moved to the AI platform group. The ML engineers had proved the approach. My job was making it hold up in production: Kafka, Lambda and Step Functions pipelines that keep embeddings current across millions of content items, the vector store on Aurora with the index tuning and partitioning to keep retrieval latency flat as the corpus grew, and the endpoints for semantic search, recommendations and duplicate detection. Most of the real work turned out to be batching, fallbacks, cost ceilings, and deciding what happens when a model call times out behind a synchronous customer endpoint.

Since January 2026 I've been on Workflows, leading the work to extend workflows and automations to the new entity types in Contentful's experience platform. That's a technical design across six services, a runtime refactor, and a storage migration with a dry-run-first backfill. I also interview engineers for the team, usually the system design round, and wrote the org's conventions for AGENTS.md and coding-agent skills.

Before Contentful I was at Anaplan, where I led a ground-up rebuild of the DocuSign extension and moved a legacy API to GraphQL, and before that I led a distributed team at Sigma Digital building software for enterprise clients. Ten years in software, seven of them building SaaS.

Before any of that I was a civil engineer in Zimbabwe. I designed water networks for the City of Bulawayo and managed a $1.8M sewer rehabilitation project. I volunteered in the GIS department, which turned into a GIS developer job, then software development at Esri South Africa. I still start most problems by asking where the system fails first. I think that's the civil engineering talking.

Since April 2026 I've been the fractional CPO at Notto Africa, which does alternative credit scoring for African lenders. There's no product engineering team yet beyond me, so I set the direction and write the code. Two products are live with customers on a book of close to a million loans. Notto Analytics ingests a lender's disbursements and repayments daily and computes vintage PAR, roll rates and yield. Notto Agent answers open-ended questions about the book and runs multi-step analysis. Because this is regulated lending, the agent's answers have to be verifiable rather than trusted: it plans the analysis, runs SQL against a read-only copy of the data, checks the result against the evidence, and keeps the plan, query and trace for audit.

I spoke at Svelte Society London in 2022 ("How I built pro-search.io with SvelteKit") and at DevConf South Africa in 2020 ("What civil engineering taught me about being a good software developer"). I've been a coding mentor with the Andela Learning Community and an external academic supervisor at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, where I did my BEng in Civil and Water Engineering.

I write the Just Reflections newsletter. If you'd rather talk, book a slot in my unoffice hours. The full work history is on the CV.