Daniel Slater

Software engineer · Cape Town

One engineer who takes a product from database to deployed.

Full-time
AI Lead Engineer at Nsuna, a hospitality platform: backend, apps, infrastructure and its voice-AI agent.
Personal projects
Tech lead at Aerias Athletics, a running brand. Founder of Leachie, lead generation and automation for small businesses.
Education
  • Convened and lectured the postgraduate finite element methods and continuum mechanics courses at UCT (University of Cape Town).
  • BSc(Eng) Mechanical and Mechatronics, and MSc(Eng) Mechanical with distinction, University of Cape Town.
  • Graduated cum laude from St John’s College, Houghton.

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[email protected] · linkedin.com/in/daniel-slater-0b7453137 · github.com/dan-slater

Daniel Slater danielslater.dev

Now

Full-time · Feb 2024 – present· Remote

Nsuna · AI Lead Engineer

  • Full-stack engineer on a hospitality platform (dine-in ordering, accommodation, discovery) since the company’s earliest days.
  • Own features through every layer: Go and Python services, GraphQL APIs, Svelte web front-ends and a React Native app.
  • Led the October 2026 CI overhaul after the move to GitHub, and wrote a CI guard that fails any test run that passes having asserted nothing.
  • Founded and lead Nsuna’s voice-AI agent, which takes real orders at two restaurants by phone and in the app; the model provider is a config choice with automatic failover.
  • Lead AI-first engineering: I build with a fenced fleet of Claude Code agent sessions across three machines, and they prove their work against the full local stack and its end-to-end tests.
The Nsuna app on a phone: discovery feed

Personal project · 2025 – present· Cape Town

Aerias Athletics · Tech lead and founding member

  • A running brand selling its own vest. I own the technology: the storefront, checkout and customer portal.
  • SvelteKit on Cloudflare, Supabase for data, Paystack checkout in Edge Functions. Live since August 2026.
aerias.co.za storefront

Personal project · 2026 – present· Cape Town

Leachie · Founder

  • Building leachie.com: lead generation, tracking and automated follow-up for small businesses.
  • Client sites are editable in place, with hosting, billing and customer accounts on a shared backend I built.
leachie.com landing page
Daniel Slater danielslater.dev

Teaching and research

2021 – 2023

University of Cape Town, CERECAM · Lecturer and Lab Engineer, Mechanical Engineering

  • Convened and lectured postgraduate courses in computational mechanics: finite element methods, continuum mechanics and nonlinear material behaviour. Owned curriculum, assignments, tests and exams.
  • Supervised final-year undergraduate and MSc students; wrote lab-equipment interfacing software and ran data processing and QC.
  • Elected CERECAM postgraduate representative, 2021 and 2022.
2020 – 2023

University of Cape Town · Tutor and 3D-Printing Assistant

  • Head tutor for Dynamics (2023), leading a tutor team; tutored Applied Mechanics, Computer Methods, Control Systems and System Design.
  • Ran 3D-printing operations and built tools for bulk submission processing and student-specific memo generation.

Projects

Education

2020 – 2023

MSc(Eng) Mechanical Engineering, with distinction

University of Cape Town

  • Dissertation: Repeatable Processing of Mechanical Test Data.
2016 – 2019

BSc(Eng) Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering

University of Cape Town

  • Fourth-year class representative, 2019.
2015

Matric

St John’s College, Johannesburg

  • Seven distinctions.

Skills

Languages
Go, Python, TypeScript / JavaScript, SQL
Backend
Go (GraphQL, gqlgen, ent), Python (FastAPI), REST and GraphQL APIs, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, ScyllaDB, Kafka, Redis
Frontend and mobile
Svelte / SvelteKit, React, React Native (Expo), Tailwind CSS
AI and voice
LiveKit Agents, WebRTC, real-time STT / LLM / TTS pipelines, LLM tool use, prompt design, Twilio SIP telephony, agentic coding workflows
Infrastructure
Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, GCP, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Linux
Practices
End-to-end feature ownership, service-layer architecture, code review, test automation (E2E, Playwright, WireMock), incident response, mentoring