Estee Van Der Walt
CTO at University of Pretoria
Elmbridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolEstee Van Der Walt is a hands-on CTO with nine years of focused experience delivering high-throughput distributed systems, production AI/ML, and cyber-resilient architectures. She leads product and technology strategy at Escendant while remaining deeply involved in execution—architecting event-driven AWS platforms, operationalising agentic AI and large-scale inference pipelines, and exposing real-time intelligence via GraphQL. Her PhD work on adversarial behaviour and real-time threat detection informs a practical "security by design" approach that spans DNS protection, threat intel graphs, and LLM safety. Comfortable in lean teams, she blends deep engineering (Kafka, Spark, graph and NoSQL systems) with product-first prioritisation to ship impact quickly. Unusually, she pairs academic rigor with years of hands-on delivery across startups and enterprises, from Meta integrity teams to Nominet’s IRAP-compliant protective DNS.
9 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
University of Johannesburg Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Big data predictive analysis machine learning AI deception detection, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Big data predictive analysis machine learning AI deception detection at University of Pretoria
Dutch, Afrikaans, English
Stackoverflow
235reputation
18kreached
2answers
3questions
Github Skills (9)
rodbc6
jupyter-notebook6
hana6
hdfs6
ipython6
hadoop6
python6
r6
broadcast6
Github contributions (5)
esteevanderwalt/TwitterAnalysis
Sep 2016 - May 2019
Contributions:37 commits, 128 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 8 months
esteevanderwalt/AI_Resources
May 2019 - Jul 2019
Contributions:21 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
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