Randi Dwi Nandra
I run engineering. For the last five years my job has mostly been taking teams that were stalled or brand new and getting them shipping on a schedule people can plan around. On-time delivery from around 50% to above 90% in three months, error rates from over 10% to under 1% on 30 million requests a month, a year-stuck MVP out in two months, infra cost down about 65%, a founding team grown from 2 to 12+, and a Flutter migration that cut development time 60%.
About
How I work
Most of the teams I've joined were either stalled or hadn't been built yet. The approach is the same each time: get hands-on with the code and the incidents first, find out what is actually breaking, then change the process around what I found. Doing it in the other order tends to produce a lot of new ceremony and the same delivery dates.
The work has been payment systems, tax filing infrastructure, mobile apps, and more recently LLM tooling that engineers on my team use daily. I still write code and review PRs. I don't think you have to stop being an engineer to run one.
I've worked mostly at startups and scale-ups, from a two-person founding team to a licensed fintech operating under government audit. The constraints at those two ends are nothing alike, but in both the person making a call is usually the one who has to live with it, which is the part I like.
currently
- role
- VP of Engineering, OnlinePajak, Jakarta
- org
- Backend, Frontend, QA, AI, Product, Design
- direct reports
- Tech Lead Managers, Sr. Engineers, Product Managers, Lead Product Designer, Sr. Production Support Analyst
- reporting line
- CEO and investors
- hands-on with
- internal code-review and bug-investigation agents
- on the side
- spoolpdf, an HTML-to-PDF render API
Expertise
What I work on
Five areas the work tends to fall into. The examples under each come from the roles listed further down.
AI Engineering
Mostly internal tooling. I build the agents my team uses, then roll them out once they're actually useful.
- Code review and bug investigation agents I wrote myself, now used across the team
- RAG pipelines pulling real-time context out of scraped data
- LLM integration and fine-tuning for Slice's Gen-AI features, built from scratch
- Spec-Driven Development is how we build at OnlinePajak by default now, not the exception
Architecture & Systems
High-traffic transaction systems and APIs, usually in regulated environments where an outage is also a compliance problem.
- 30M+ requests a month at OnlinePajak, error rate held under 1%
- Rearchitected the core transaction systems behind most of our P0/P1 incidents
- Payment infrastructure at Slice and OY, including Indonesian e-wallet integrations
- AWS, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes. Slice's cloud migration cut infra cost about 65%.
Delivery & Process
Making delivery dates something the business can plan around, and making the numbers behind them visible.
- On-time delivery went from around 50% to consistently above 90% in 3 months
- There was no engineering metrics visibility at OnlinePajak. I built it, and leadership tracks the org with it now.
- QA automation as a real quality gate before release, which cut regressions reaching production
- CI/CD on GitLab and GitHub, with Spec-Driven Development as the default workflow
Leadership & Strategy
Running cross-functional orgs and working directly with founders, CEOs, and investors.
- A cross-functional org at OnlinePajak covering Backend, Frontend, QA, AI, Product, and Design
- Mindtera's team went from 2 engineers to 12+ across mobile, backend, and cloud
- Reporting to the CEO and investors, and turning what they want into a roadmap engineers can build
- Hired and mentored the team at Slice, and both execution speed and code quality improved after
Product & Stakeholders
The parts of the job that aren't code: product decisions, executive conversations, and regulatory constraints.
- Ran Mindtera's product team directly for about 6 months, on top of engineering
- Worked with Slice's CEO and COO on business and product strategy while still writing code
- OnlinePajak runs under Indonesian government tax licensing, and we've stayed fully compliant
- Bahasa Indonesia native, English highly proficient
Impact
What changed
90%+
On-time delivery
Was around 50% when I joined OnlinePajak
<1%
API error rate
Down from over 10% on 30M+ requests a month
52%
Client complaints
Drop after rearchitecting the core transaction systems
60%
Dev time
Cut by the Flutter migration at OY Indonesia
Experience
Where I've worked
OnlinePajak
Jakarta, Indonesia
VP of Engineering
Sep 2025 — Present
- OnlinePajak is a government-licensed tax platform, an Indonesian unicorn since 2021, covering the whole business tax lifecycle at more than 30 million requests a month. I run the product-dev org: Backend, Frontend, QA, AI, Product, and Design, reporting to the CEO and investors.
- On-time delivery was around 50% when I joined. Within 3 months of reworking how the team planned and shipped, it was consistently above 90%.
- OpenAPI error rates on those 30M+ monthly requests were over 10%. They're under 1% now, and still trending down.
- Most of our P0/P1 incidents traced back to the core transaction systems, so I rearchitected them. Those incidents are gone and client complaints dropped about 52%.
- I built the internal AI agents for code review and bug investigation myself, then rolled them out to the team. It's one of the ways I stay hands-on despite the title.
- Spec-Driven Development and RAG-based tooling are now how we build by default, not the exception.
- QA automation didn't exist as a release gate before. I started that initiative, and fewer regressions reach production now.
- There was no engineering metrics visibility when I got here. I put it together, and it's how leadership tracks the org now.
- All of it happens under strict government tax-licensing requirements, which we've stayed fully compliant with.
Slice Group
Jakarta, Indonesia
Technical Advisor
Apr 2025 — Sep 2025
- Slice is a SaaS influencer-marketing platform for brands and agencies. After two years running its engineering, I moved to advising the CEO on turning it into an AI-powered campaign platform.
- The Gen-AI capabilities I designed and built from scratch: LLM integration, fine-tuning, and real-time context pulled from data scraping.
- The creator data enrichment pipeline covers around 500k profiles, combining scraping with LLM processing.
Head of Engineering
May 2023 — Mar 2025
- The MVP had been stuck for over a year before I joined. It shipped within 2 months of me coming on board.
- I built the in-app payment system from the ground up. It now handles millions of transactions and took revenue from zero to millions.
- Cloud infrastructure migration cut infra cost about 65%, without users noticing a difference.
- Hiring and mentoring was a large part of the job, and both execution speed and code quality improved as the team changed.
- Strategy work with the CEO and COO ran alongside all of this, and I kept writing code across backend, infrastructure, and web.
Mindtera
Jakarta, Indonesia
AVP of Engineering
Jan 2022 — Apr 2023
- By this point I was the sole engineering decision-maker, with 12+ engineers across mobile, backend, and cloud.
- The CEO and CMO used me as a regular sounding board on product and tech direction, and for about six months (Aug 2022 to Feb 2023) I ran the product team directly.
- Represented Mindtera at the Google for Startups Accelerator, SEA Cohort 2023.
Engineering Manager (Founding Engineer)
Jun 2021 — Dec 2021
- I joined as founding engineer when the team was two people.
- The first MVP shipped with just me and one other engineer, launching on both Play Store and App Store.
- Everything past the code was also from scratch: culture, process, and the product itself, which reached thousands of users.
OY Indonesia
Jakarta, Indonesia
Technical Lead Manager
Sep 2019 — May 2021
- The company was running native mobile codebases. Migrating to Flutter cut development time 60% and maintenance cost 40%.
- Also built the Java Spring backend behind our payment services.
Software Engineer — Backend
Apr 2019 — Sep 2019
- Payment backend services in Java, plus integrations with Indonesian e-wallets.
- Built a personal finance feature into the app.
Software Engineer — iOS
Jan 2018 — Apr 2019
- Native iOS in Swift, focused on performance and UX.
Serasi Autoraya (Astra Group)
Jakarta, Indonesia
Jnr Programmer (Android)
Nov 2017 — Jan 2018
- Native Android work on logistics, car rental, and bidding apps: SELOG, Trac, and iBid.
- Also supervised other engineers on delivery timelines.
Management Trainee
Nov 2016 — Oct 2017
- Gathered user problems, turned them into requirements, and built the mobile solutions myself.
Building
Side projects
spoolpdf
spoolpdf.nandra.devspoolpdf renders HTML or a URL into a PDF over an API, for invoices, reports, and templates, so a team doesn't have to run a browser farm just to produce documents. I built it and I run it, patching and capacity included.
- Self-serve signup with Google, GitHub, or email
- API-key auth, keys created in the dashboard and sent as a bearer token on each render
- Four tiers, free through $79/mo, covering 100 to 20,000 PDFs a month
- Public health endpoint at /healthz on the production API
Tech Stack
Tools & technologies
Languages, platforms, and infrastructure I've shipped production code with.
education
Bachelor of Computer Science
University of Brawijaya · Malang, Indonesia · Aug 2012 — Sep 2016
Contact
How to reach me
Email is usually fastest. Happy to talk about engineering leadership, AI tooling, or anything else on this page.