/ JLM Technologies · Cape Town, South Africa · 33.92°S 18.42°E
Joshua
Malan.
Mechanical & Biomedical Engineer turned one-man data platform. I build financial engines, devise fleet telemetry, Machine Learning valuation models and privacy enforced database systems. Every number on this site was proven twice.
press ~ anywhere
for the terminal
lines of code shipped solo
area under the curve, payment prediction (1.0 = perfect)
revenue reconciled to billing
access points under telemetry
transactions analysed
residual radio channel conflicts
Selected systems
Financial Engine
A bottom-up cash-flow model that reconciles to 99% of billed revenue.
▮ VEIL
Privacy enforced by the database, not the application.
Valuation Engine
A machine-learning pricing engine that reports the worse but honest number.
RF Telemetry Platform
10,000+ access points. Zero residual channel conflicts.
Telemetry Ingest Pipeline
A database outage loses nothing. Proven rather than promised.
Hiring Platform
Apply for a job from any phone. No account, no CV, four languages.
Price Comparison Engine
Photograph a competitor's invoice. Get an honest savings report.
Myocardial Mechanics
Measuring how heart muscle deforms, and making the material model prove it.
joshua@jlm-technologies:~$ ls projects/▌
How I work
Five rules that show up in every project, usually because breaking them once was expensive.
P1
Honest metrics or nothing
When a champion model's 10.6% error turned out to be a measurement flaw, it was rebuilt on a protocol that measured 12.3%, and had to win on that number before shipping. Experiments that prove nothing get reported as proving nothing. The customer-facing report shows where the competitor wins.
P2
Parity as proof
Every port from one language to another is verified against golden fixtures from the original: to a millionth, to the cent, or bit for bit. One implementation per metric. A rewrite that cannot prove it behaves identically does not ship.
P3
Enforce at the lowest layer
Privacy in database policies rather than application code. Second-factor checks inside the identity resolver. Builds that fail when a language is missing a translation, or when a development shortcut reaches production config.
P4
Fail closed, degrade gracefully
Rows are absent, never redacted-but-present. Ingest buffers through database outages without loss. When AI budgets run out, deterministic paths keep the product working.
P5
Audit yourself adversarially
Commissioned audits of my own work found 20 wrong-number discrepancies in a dashboard port, a critical authorization bypass, and two data-mixing bugs in machine-learning models. All published internally. All fixed with regression tests.
The arc
I trained as a mechanical engineer: biaxial testing of heart tissue, digital image correlation, a finite-element solver written from scratch in Python. The rigor stuck.
Then I joined a township internet provider as a one-person data function and taught myself the modern stack on the job: data engineering, statistics, machine learning, full-stack product, and the operations to run it all in production. Everything on this site was designed, built, deployed and documented by me, then reviewed and audited adversarially, with parity tests as the referee.
Alongside that, I ship real products: an AI hiring platform live in pilot, a machine-learning valuation engine in dealer pilot, and a privacy architecture I can only show under a codename.
/ what I live by
Stoicism, practised rather than quoted: control what I can, meet the rest with composure. Hard work as the baseline, never the brag. And courage: publish the honest number, start the hard thing, be a beginner in public.
/ experience
Data, ML & Platform Engineer · Ikeja
The entire data platform, analytics, machine-learning and internal-tools function for a South African township internet provider, as one person. Built the bottom-up financial engine, the radio telemetry and optimisation platform across a fleet of more than 10,000 access points, the push-telemetry ingest pipeline, and the full-stack analytics platform that replaced the previous dashboard stack. Schema to ingestion to machine learning to product to deployment.
Postgraduate Tutor · University of Cape Town
Tutored Solid Mechanics, Mechanical Vibrations and Machine Elements Design.
Engineering Intern · Jonkers Sailplanes
Operational analysis across production and administration. Design and fabrication of fibreglass and composite glider components.
Engineering Intern · Potchefstroom Engineering
Concept-to-execution mechanical projects: CAD to CAM to CNC manufacturing and shop-floor implementation.
/ education
MSc
2023–2025
Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering, University of Cape Town
Completed. Myocardial tissue characterisation: biaxial testing with full-field optical strain measurement, custom 3D-printed apparatus, and Python pipelines for stress computation and material-model fitting. Also built a from-scratch Python finite-element solver covering elasticity and heat conduction, linear and nonlinear.
BEng
2019–2022
Mechanical Engineering, University of Pretoria
Dean's Merit List 2020. Tutored Solid Mechanics, Vibrations and Machine Design.
NSC
2014–2018
Pretoria Boys High School
Five distinctions.
ECSA
Candidate Engineer
Registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa.
Off duty
try `personal` in the terminal
Classically trained pianist, ages five to eighteen, theory and all. A passion for music from as early as I can remember.
A reader first, classics mostly. Currently deep in Dostoevsky and Camus, with Nietzsche and Kafka in rotation and the Stoics on the nightstand.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu blue belt. Sounds impressive until you watch me get folded daily by smaller, calmer people. I keep going back, which is the whole point.
English and Afrikaans fluently, and enough Portuguese to follow an argument about football.
Pop!_OS daily, Arch for tinkering. The dotfiles folder has commit history.
Manchester United. The accent colour on this site is not a coincidence.
Married to Katiya Carreira. Family first, everything else after.
References
contact details on request
Peter Coetzee
Owner, Ikeja. Current employer.
Dr Reuben Govender
Postgraduate supervisor, University of Cape Town.
Dr Niel van der Watt
Character reference.
/ contact
joshualiammalan@gmail.comOpen to hard problems, especially where data, safety-critical engineering and honest numbers meet.