Sonny N. Lans
10+ years designing, building and evolving complex, highly scalable distributed systems in production — carrying architectural responsibility alongside hands-on delivery since 2021.
Backend and platform engineer, TU Delft Computer Science graduate. My work concentrates on the decisions that determine whether a platform scales: service boundaries and ownership, data consistency and delivery guarantees, caching and invalidation strategy, failure containment, and the trade-offs between them. Day to day that means distributed coordination at Kubernetes cluster scale, polyglot persistence (Neo4j, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, S3), integration boundaries with third-party SaaS, and security architecture — encryption at rest with key rotation, resolver-level access control, hardened CSPs. Alongside it, technical leadership: Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD standards, test strategy, and coaching engineers through joint problem-solving.
Career
Professional Experience
03/2024
PwC·Dev Talents
Architectural ownership of critical capabilities within Beacon, PwC's Kubernetes-based enterprise graph-data platform for tax professionals: dynamic per-client virtual server environments with dedicated Neo4j databases, a semi-shared GraphQL/Node.js API and dual React front-ends over polyglot persistence.
05/2023
Belastingdienst·Ventus
Advised on and implemented architectural improvements to MKM2, a high-throughput messaging platform designed to process approximately 10 million messages per day under strict security and availability requirements, running inside the Belastingdienst's internal on-premise infrastructure.
02/2022
Alliander - Insight into Environment·Navara
Technical lead for the architectural renewal of the "Insight into Environment" platform, an energy-network visualisation embedded in Alliander's on-premise SAP landscape, whose existing mapping foundation could not carry the required interaction model and had become a performance ceiling.
06/2021
Stimulansz·Navara
Member of the Navara team that rebuilt the legacy KiC quality-control system from the ground up on GraphQL, React, Node.js, MongoDB and Azure. Contributed across the stack, and within the team I owned the delivery infrastructure.
04/2021
Alliander - Smart Cable Guard·Navara
Joined a newly formed three-person team for the Smart Cable Guard platform, which monitors the condition of the energy grid, within Alliander's SAP landscape — then took over its management and continued development single-handedly for one day a week.
01/2021
Nestlé·Navara
Worked with Navara's Zigzag team through the final phase before go-live of Nestlé's puppy training application. Responsible for parts of the CI/CD pipeline and for delivering new features across the stack.
10/2020
Deft Power·Navara
Designed and delivered the React Native MVP for Android and iOS for an electric-vehicle charging proposition, including real-time map, routing and backend integration.
06/2019
NG Compliance·NG-Compliance
Extended and optimised the Sherlock GRC platform — anti-bribery legislation (FCPA, UK Bribery Act) and Governance, Risk and Compliance — and implemented customer-specific requirements on top of the standard product.
11/2018
TATA-Steel·IBM
Owned the resolution of billing and service-delivery data discrepancies between a TATA Steel system and an IBM system — a persistent mismatch that was being corrected manually — and built the reconciliation independently in Python over the SOAP interfaces of both systems.
09/2018
IBM·IBM
Designed and built IBM's internal Feedback Form platform end to end on a MEAN stack, with Watson NLA integration for response analysis and a CloudFoundry CI/CD pipeline. The platform was subsequently sold to other divisions within IBM.
09/2017
Jumbo Supermarkten·IBM
Member of the integration team responsible for improving, replacing and extending the interfaces across Jumbo's enterprise infrastructure, and for connecting new parts of the organisation to the digital platform.
Technical Arsenal
A curated taxonomy of my core competencies, mapped by proficiency and domain.
Technical Expertise
Skills & Proficiency
Independent Work
Selected Works
A collection of projects showcasing technical depth, architectural patterns, and practical implementation.
PRIVACY
Signal-style secure messenger for 1:1, group, and multi-device chat, built with a Flutter UI over a Rust crypto/networking core.
GAME_DEV
A 4X RTS space game — colonize, research, build fleets, and battle — with real-time multiplayer, AI opponents, and per-turn combat resolution, built in Rust on the Bevy ECS.
TOOLING
A monorepo of 18 production TypeScript packages (auth, payments, storage, crawling, queues, observability, and a deploy CLI) extracted from real projects and reused across the lans.cloud platform.
AI_ML
A self-hosted coding agent built from three decoupled services: a native Rust indexer that keeps a hybrid vector + relational picture of the codebase, a checkpointed LangGraph engine with human-in-the-loop approval, and a Next.js hub.
AI_ML
A continuously running local AI assistant on the same GX10 box: an OpenAI-compatible router in front of a self-hosted SGLang model, an ARQ agent swarm for multi-hour research jobs, LanceDB + Kuzu + SQLite memory over an Obsidian vault, and a Signal bridge so it can message its owner first.
SYSTEMS
A web-crawling SaaS platform with a visual job builder, scheduling, multi-format export, and five specialized BullMQ worker types, built on the @snlans/* stack.
SYSTEMS
The tools platform at lans.cloud: over a hundred single-purpose browser tools across 11 curated clusters, each its own SEO-targeted page, with first-party analytics and search data deciding what gets built next.
lans.cloudSYSTEMS
An e-commerce platform for digital products, SaaS subscriptions, services, and license keys — Stripe plus a provider-abstracted crypto payment path, all money handled as integer cents.
shop.lans.cloudSYSTEMS
An Astro blog that builds posts from a folder of markdown, with premium/paywalled content, full-text search, per-post OG images, and heavy SEO.
blog.lans.cloudSYSTEMS
The site you are looking at — a NestJS + GraphQL backend and a Next.js frontend with an interactive expertise graph, gated CV downloads, and a full admin panel.
cv.lans.cloudTOOLING
A local search engine over every tracked markdown file and commit message across ~36 repositories: hybrid keyword and vector retrieval in one SQLite file, plus an exact cross-repo dependency graph. It runs as a CLI, an MCP server, and an always-on daemon that surfaces a relevant prior decision into an AI assistant prompt before anyone thinks to go looking for it.
SYSTEMS
A raffle/lottery platform with scheduled draws and on-chain deposit verification — Express + MongoDB backend, React frontend, ethers.js against BSC testnet, cron-driven draws.
OTHER
A client portfolio site for a 2D designer, with a distinctive circular space-themed UI, an admin dashboard, and a Sharp image-processing pipeline.
milendimitrov.artTOOLING
A Model Context Protocol server exposing Plane project management plus Git and GitHub as 35 tools for AI assistants, with ticket-complexity scoring and dependency parsing that propose how to split work.
INFRASTRUCTURE
The self-hosted data and services layer behind most of the lans.cloud family: S3-compatible MinIO object storage, PostgreSQL 16, Redis 7, plus self-hosted Umami analytics and Remark42 comments — with nightly encrypted offsite backups.
HOMELAB
A personal homelab VPS (2025): an Nginx reverse proxy fronting Gitea, a private Docker registry wired into a push-to-deploy pipeline, Nextcloud, and WireGuard + RustDesk remote access.
INFRASTRUCTURE
A thin, internal-only Fastify HTTP gateway in front of SMTP, so sibling apps hold an API key instead of the mailbox password.
AI_ML
A curated toolkit of standards, configs, templates, and a setup wizard for AI-assisted development across Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor.
OTHER
A small ERC-20 token (MishCoin, MISH) with owner minting, holder burning, and stray-token recovery, built on Hardhat with OpenZeppelin plus a small ethers deploy script.
Get in Touch
Interested in working together or have a question? Contact me directly.