Ben Wolfaardt
Engineering Lead @Kima Network
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WORK HISTORY
Engineering Lead @Kima Network
IL
When funding dried up and the team fractured — VP disengaged, colleagues resigning, project tracking abandoned — I didn\'t wait for direction. I volunteered to take over project management after our PM was let go, absorbed the VP\'s responsibilities when he departed, and picked up DevOps when our last infrastructure engineer left. What started as \"someone needs to do this\" became a natural evolution into leading the entire R&D function — reporting directly to both the CEO & CTO, owning delivery, and keeping the protocol moving forward. In this role, I:• Own sprint planning, delivery tracking, and cross-functional coordination for a team of 4 engineers — reporting directly to the CEO in weekly progress sessions.• Lead the full cloud migration from GCP and Azure to AWS — transitioning from Docker Swarm to ECS, implementing S3 static site deployments, EC2 instances with SSM, and Cloudflare Tunnels for certificate management — all provisioned via Terraform.• Serve as codeowner and sole maintainer of multiple production services I architected, while continuing hands-on blockchain development in Go.• Liaise with external service providers to define technical requirements and negotiate commercial terms, bridging engineering needs with business objectives.• Rebuilt CI/CD pipelines and DevOps workflows end-to-end after the departure of our infrastructure team, drawing on prior DevOps experience at Bitpanda.• Restored engineering accountability by reintroducing structured Jira tracking and sprint cadences after 6+ months of untracked development.
EDUCATION
Andrew Owen School of Art & Design
Animation, Interactive Technology, Video Graphics and Special Effects
Stellenbosch University
Bachelor of Engineering - BEng (Honours), Mechatronics and Biomedical Engineering
ABOUT BEN WOLFAARDT
Your son is wired differently\" — my grade 1 teacher\'s remark still rings true.Today, I\'m an Engineering Lead at Kima Network, leading the R&D team building a bridgeless cross-chain settlement protocol in Go, processing $20M monthly across 12 chains including EVMs, Solana, Bitcoin, and Tron. As a core contributor, I built the TEE API wrapper making any API hardware-attestable, a real-time multi-chain fee estimation engine, and fiat-to-chain webhook integration. When our VP and PM departed, I stepped in — owning delivery, team coordination, DevOps, and the AWS/Terraform infrastructure migration because the work needed doing.The path here was anything but linear. Mechatronic Engineering degree, a detour into industrial sales across Africa, co-founding a trading startup in Amsterdam, building on Cosmos SDK at a startup in Italy, scaling blockchain infrastructure at Bitpanda (Austria\'s first unicorn). I first wrote code at 9, mined ETH in 2017, and have been building professionally in Web3 since 2021.I\'m most effective where the problems are ambiguous and the ownership is total.
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