RENE JAMES BALANDRA, JR.

Engaged under a professional services consultancy agreement supporting enterprise software development for White Cloak Technologies while based in Australia. Contribute to software design, implementation, and technical planning within distributed engineering teams. Support development tooling, CI/CD processes, and engineering documentation initiatives. Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to deliver maintainable software solutions. Apply AI-assisted analysis, pseudocode generation, and technical research to support software design and engineering decision-making.

Led technical delivery for a cross-platform fintech platform serving over 17 million customers, coordinating engineering efforts across iOS, Android, web, and backend teams while contributing to architecture, feature planning, and engineering standards. Implemented and maintained integrations with upstream enterprise systems using Java/Spring services and Kafka event streams, enabling reliable event-driven communication across distributed systems. Coordinated within a structured release process across multiple teams, including rotating deployment lead responsibilities and participating in cross-team regression testing. Improved long-standing technical debt through better feature documentation, refactoring legacy components, and supporting engineering standardisation efforts. Handled 3+ L3 support escalations monthly for legacy implementations, maintaining release continuity across platforms.

Designed, implemented, and delivered customer-facing iOS features from technical planning through App Store release, collaborating on architectural decisions to support scalability and maintainability. Built user interfaces using UIKit, AutoLayout, Storyboards/XIB, and SnapKit for both storyboard-based and programmatic layout. Applied MVP-Coordinator and MVVM patterns to improve codebase modularity and wrote unit tests using XCTest to maintain reliability. Integrated RESTful APIs and managed push notifications via OneSignal and Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM/APNS). Automated build and deployment pipelines using Fastlane with TestFlight and Firebase App Distribution. Monitored and triaged production crashes using Firebase Crashlytics to reduce time-to-diagnosis for post-release issues. Served as a trainer in the WC Academy programme to transition junior engineers and career-shifters into production teams.