Arno Smit
AI And Product Lead at Alternativa Nordics AB
Paarl, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolArno Smit is an AI and product leader with 13 years of experience building and scaling two-sided marketplaces and fintech platforms, most notably co-founding FundedByMe (now Pepins) which helped raise the equivalent of $400M and later led its product and tech transformation. He combines hands-on engineering roots (Python/Django, early full‑stack dev) with strategic product leadership, having driven pivots to PaaS, headless CMS migrations, API ecosystems and DORA compliance while cutting cloud costs and improving conversion metrics. Recently he’s applied AI and automation to operational workflows—deploying n8n pipelines, GPT assistants and Airtable architectures to reclaim hours and deliver measurable ROI. Comfortable as a founder, CPTO or consultant, he blends entrepreneurial grit with pragmatic delivery across aviation, crowdfunding and HealthTech. A serial builder since childhood, he brings a knack for spotting small inefficiencies and turning them into scalable product advantages.
13 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Web development, Graphic Design, Web development, Graphic Design at Northlink CollegeElectrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering Technology/Technician, Electrical, Electronic and Communications Engineering Technology/Technician at Technical High School Windhoek
English, Afrikaans, Swedish
Stackoverflow
4,871reputation
730kreached
49answers
145questions
Github Skills (22)
mangopay9
packaging7
installer7
django7
python7
paypal7
pip6
libjpeg6
foreign-keys6
orm6
api6
drupal6
yii6
mysql6
python-client3
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
FundedByMe/django-bisnode
Jan 2015 - May 2015
Django Wrapper for Bisnode
Contributions:7 PRs, 6 pushes, 9 branches in 4 months
djangopython
appel268576/FoodTracker
Jun 2015 - Jul 2015
Contributions:12 PRs, 13 pushes, 11 branches in 1 month
foodintakeswiftiosswift-app
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