Lane Cove North, NSW, Australia
Michael Hewett
Senior IT Consultant/ Solution Architect/ Engineering Lead
Senior consultant and solution architect with 19+ years across banking, finance, defence and government — shipping complex products and scaling the teams behind them.
- 19+
- Years in industry
- 30+
- Engineers led & grown
- 170+
- APIs standardised on Ark
- ~4mo
- Zealth: greenfield to live
Architecture, delivery, and the teams behind it
I'm a senior IT consultant and solution architect with 19+ yearsacross banking, finance, defence and government. I architected a white-label lending SaaS from greenfield to production, and led backend delivery across three major releases of a multi-tenant banking middleware platform.
My strengths sit in API and integration architecture, full-stack and native mobile, cloud and DevOps (Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform) and applied AI — with a track record of shipping complex products and scaling the teams behind them. I care about spec-first design, managed breaking changes that don't break anyone, and systems that stay maintainable long after launch.
Featured projects
Zealth
Solution Architect & Lead Engineer
A white-label digital lending-origination SaaS for Australian lenders — architected and led from greenfield to a live containerised deployment in roughly four months.
- React 19
- React Router v7
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Claude SDK
- +7
Ark
Backend & Platform Engineer / Frontend Lead
Digizoo's multi-tenant, white-label banking and lending middleware — an API orchestration platform that lets banks own their customer experience while keeping vendor flexibility across core banking, identity, address and messaging systems.
- TypeScript
- NestJS
- Prisma
- SQL Server
- Temporal.io
- +7
Greater Bank Native Apps
Team Lead & Mobile Architect
Led development and architecture of Greater Bank's first native iOS and Android apps — and grew the mobile capability from zero to a 30+ engineer team.
- Swift
- UIKit
- Kotlin
- Android
- iOS
- +1
Ampol App Re-write
Senior Android Developer
Led the ground-up Kotlin re-write of the flagship Android app for one of Australia's largest fuel and convenience retailers — modernising incrementally with zero disruption to customers.
- Kotlin
- Android
- Jetpack Compose
Afterpay US Lending
React Native Developer
Delivered a US consumer-lending experience end to end in the Afterpay app for a global buy-now-pay-later provider, across React and React Native.
- React Native
- React
- TypeScript
Experience
Zealth — Digizoo product
Feb 2026 – PresentSolution Architect & Lead Engineer
Architected and led the build of a white-label digital lending-origination SaaS for Australian lenders, taking it from greenfield to a live containerised deployment in roughly four months.
- Delivered a white-label lending-origination SaaS from greenfield to live deployment in ~4 months as lead engineer and primary contributor.
- Designed a schema-driven form engine rendering ~30 field types from a single typed contract — reused across the app, a drag-and-drop builder and an AI generator.
- Built an AI Design-to-Code tool on the Anthropic Claude SDK converting Figma designs into validated form schemas.
- React 19
- React Router v7
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Claude SDK
- Zod
- Playwright
- ArgoCD
- k3s
- Terraform
- Buildkite
Ark — Digizoo platform
Jul 2023 – PresentBackend & Platform Engineer / Frontend Lead
Digizoo's multi-tenant, white-label banking and lending middleware — an API orchestration platform that lets banks own their customer experience while keeping vendor flexibility. Initially frontend lead for the React Native experience layer, then focused on backend and API delivery across three major releases.
- Anchored the v2.0.0 release by leading the backend migration from a legacy customer entity to a unified parties model, behind a managed breaking change with zero production incidents.
- Unified two third-party identity-verification vendors behind a single vendor-agnostic KYX API contract.
- Retired legacy authentication and consolidated on OAuth2 / Microsoft Entra ID with a five-tier endpoint authorisation model.
- Standardised the error contract across ~170 endpoints and 7 services onto a domain-classification taxonomy.
- TypeScript
- NestJS
- Prisma
- SQL Server
- Temporal.io
- OpenAPI
- Zod
- OAuth2 / Entra ID
- Azure
- AKS
- Terraform
- Buildkite
Ampol
Feb 2024 – Aug 2024Senior Android Developer
Led the ground-up Kotlin re-write of the flagship consumer app for one of Australia's largest fuel and convenience retailers.
- Led the ground-up Kotlin re-write using a strangler-pattern approach so the app modernised incrementally without disrupting the existing customer base.
- Kept the app shipping to production on an uninterrupted release cadence throughout the full rebuild.
- Kotlin
- Android
- Jetpack Compose
Afterpay
Feb 2022 – Jul 2023React Native Developer
Delivered a US consumer-lending experience end to end in the Afterpay app for a global buy-now-pay-later provider.
- Delivered a US consumer-lending experience end to end, working across Afterpay's React and React Native stack to let customers apply for short-term loans.
- Shipped consumer-lending features across web and mobile against Afterpay's core framework, payment systems and shared React/React Native clients.
- React Native
- React
- TypeScript
Greater Bank
Feb 2019 – Feb 2022Team Lead & Mobile Architect
Led development and architecture of Greater Bank's first native iOS and Android apps as part of a digital transformation programme.
- Established the codebases, coding standards and engineering practices from scratch for the bank's first native apps.
- Grew the bank's native mobile capability from zero to a 30+ engineer iOS/Android team, defining hiring, standards and mentoring.
- Owned the mobile technical roadmap end to end, from experience definition through delivery to retail customers.
- Swift
- UIKit
- Kotlin
- Android
- iOS
- Mentoring
Pacific National & Westpac
Mar 2018 – Feb 2019Mobile & Technical Consultant
Field-mobility apps for a national rail freight operator, and an institutional banking platform upgrade.
- Built iOS and Android field-worker apps for Pacific National's Fast Apps programme, digitising rail-yard wagon inventory and consist management.
- Upgraded Westpac's institutional banking (WIB) platform from Backbase 5.5 to 5.7 with no disruption to live banking services.
- iOS
- Android
- Backbase
Kloud Solutions
Aug 2016 – Mar 2018Development Consultant
Professional and managed-services specialist in cloud computing.
- Rebuilt the front end of iPower — PwC Australia's practice-management system — on Angular with a library of reusable framework components.
- Delivered the Normandy project for the Department of Education & Training using .NET Service Fabric and Angular 2 across on-premise and cloud.
- Angular
- .NET
- Service Fabric
- xUnit
Fujitsu Australia
Jan 2010 – Aug 2016Technical Consultant
Web systems, mobile apps, cloud services and rich-client applications for Fujitsu clients.
- Delivered the Northern Territory Government Grants Management System as a ground-up build in .NET MVC, Entity Framework and SQL over a two-and-a-half-year programme.
- Led technical quality and DevOps for the ABS Perpetual delivery, establishing code-quality standards and build-health/test-coverage reporting.
- Contributed to the National Rail Safety Regulator (RegIS) system and built a WPF touch-screen application for grain load/discharge tracking.
- .NET MVC
- Entity Framework
- SQL
- WPF
- DevOps
CBH Group · Thales Australia
2006 – 2012Applications Developer · Software Engineer
Early career across a major grain-handling cooperative and a defence software house.
- CBH Group (2011–2012) — applications for a major Western Australian grain-handling cooperative.
- Thales Australia (2006–2009) — enhancements and defect fixes to mission-critical defence systems in teams of 6–25, predominantly in Java.
- Java
- C#
- .NET
Core skills
Architecture & Platforms
- Solution architecture
- API & integration middleware
- Microservices
- Backend-for-frontend (BFF)
- Multi-tenant / white-label platforms
- Connector orchestration & routing
- Durable workflows (Temporal.io)
- Spec-first APIs (OpenAPI)
- Schema-driven systems
Backend
- TypeScript
- NestJS
- Node.js
- Prisma ORM
- SQL Server
- PostgreSQL
- REST APIs
- Zod validation
- .NET / C# (legacy)
Frontend & Mobile
- React
- React Router
- React Native
- iOS — Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit
- Android — Kotlin, Jetpack Compose
- Tailwind CSS
- Angular (legacy)
Cloud & DevOps
- Microsoft Azure (AKS, Entra ID, Key Vault)
- Terraform / Terragrunt
- Kubernetes / Kustomize
- ArgoCD (GitOps)
- Docker
- Buildkite
- GitHub Actions
- OpenTelemetry observability
AI
- Anthropic Claude API / SDK
- LLM-driven code & content generation
- Structured outputs
- Design-to-code automation
Ways of working
- Technical leadership & mentoring
- Agile / Scrum
- BDD (Cucumber)
- Test-driven development
- CI/CD & release management
- Stakeholder management
On YouTube
YouTube
@TheY2T
Away from the keyboard I game competitively-ish. @TheY2T is where I post the results: Hitman master-difficulty speedruns, aim-training runs and the occasional new release.
Let's talk
Open to senior consulting, solution architecture and engineering-leadership work — especially in banking, finance and platform/API-heavy domains. Drop a message and I'll get back to you.



