Dérik Thirion
Development Manager at Santam Insurance
Somerset West, South Africa
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDérik Thirion is a seasoned development manager with 16 years of experience turning complex ideas into scalable, production-grade technology platforms across insurance, retail, IoT, and speech-tech domains. He combines hands-on engineering (frequent Python contributions) with strategic leadership, having grown and restructured teams rapidly, improved sprint efficiency, and driven measurable architecture gains like a 94% reduction in media upload times. His background spans CTO and head-of-technology roles where he designed high-performance claim-settlement systems, implemented BPMN/DMN workflows, and led data science and cloud cost-optimization efforts. Comfortable across embedded systems to cloud-native services, he brings deep applied knowledge in AI, cryptography, and automated testing frameworks. Based in Somerset West, South Africa, Dérik is notable for marrying rigorous academic foundations (M.Eng/B.Eng Electronic Engineering) with a track record of operational governance improvements and fast, pragmatic delivery.
16 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
M.Eng. Electronic Engineering, M.Eng. Electronic Engineering at University of Pretoria 
Afrikaans, Sign Language, English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (8)
asterisk9
pjsip9
angular-module5
coding5
pipe3
angular2
tablet2
dynamic-forms2
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
JaSureInc/eternal-hello-world
Oct 2023 - Apr 2024
An enduring tribute to the timeless 'Hello, World!' tradition in coding.
Contributions:7 PRs, 2 pushes, 3 branches in 5 months
thirionjwf/goal-guru
Mar 2023 - Mar 2023
Contributions:21 pushes, 1 branch in 1 day
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