Conrad StrydomCape Town, ZA

Conrad Strydom

Software Development Manager, Clickatell

Fifteen years leading production engineering, most of it in bot-driven and conversational commerce, with agentic systems the most recent focus.

I'm part of the team running engineering for Clickatell's chat commerce platform. It moves billions of messages a year at high availability, for customers in banking, airlines, and telecoms. I write about what it takes to run agentic systems inside regulated environments: version control for prompts, rollback plans, audit trails.

By the numbers

224%YoY platform volume growth, publicly recognised
99.98%uptime across billions of messages a year
66%hosting cost cut via cloud migration
15+ yrsIC to Head of Technology to engineering leadership

Career

2019 — now

Software Development Manager, Clickatell

Lead engineering for Clickatell. Distributed teams across South Africa and Nigeria, plus external burst capacity.

KYC-compliant chat banking · boarding passes and airline customer service · telcos · insurance · retail

2018 — 2019

Architecture & Development Manager, Cumii International

Reported to the Group CTO. Built a team from scratch and led the launch of Vaya Africa, a ride-hailing platform, in Zimbabwe.

2014 — 2018

Head of Technology, PriceCheck (Naspers)

Led all technology for the business. Cut hosting cost 66% through a cloud migration and ran a satellite team in Lagos.

2010 — 2014

Senior Developer, PriceCheck (Naspers)

Search migration to Solr, scalable feed ingestion, high-availability infrastructure.

What I write about

Agentic systems in production

The gap between a demo and a system a compliance team will actually approve.

Engineering leadership, post-agent

What hiring and code review look like once an agent writes the first draft.

Delivery inside regulated industries

Banking, telco, logistics, insurance. The constraint is usually data residency, legacy integration, or who gets blamed when it's wrong — rarely the model.

Building outside Silicon Valley

Shipping production systems across South Africa, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, where unreliable connectivity and fragmented payment rails are the real constraints. Most conference talks skip them.

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