Luke Leach
Full Stack Engineer focused on performance engineering and building robust systems
About
I’m a Full Stack Engineer with an honours degree in Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering. I’m drawn to complex systems and the challenge of making them faster and more reliable — profiling applications, tracing bottlenecks to their root cause, and engineering solutions that deliver measurable improvements.
I take real pleasure in the design phase — thinking from first principles until the plan is logically sound, because a well-reasoned design tends to handle edge cases naturally rather than needing to account for them one by one.
I thrive in collaborative environments, approaching every challenge with an open mind — I learn readily from those around me and rarely make the same mistake twice.
The quality of what I build is a personal reflection of my craft and I find myself going to great lengths in order to be genuinely proud of what I build.
Work Experience
Flight Centre Travel GroupHybrid
Full Stack Engineer
Summary
Full Stack Engineer in the Supplier Integrations team, building and maintaining APIs that integrate with external travel suppliers.
Responsibilities & Achievements
- Primary engineer on a new hotel search API (NestJS, TypeScript, Kubernetes/EKS) now powering the AU Stays page at flightcentre.com.au — delivering 2.5–3× better average response times and ~5× better P99 vs the legacy system.
- Diagnosed CPU-blocking bottlenecks in the legacy hotel search API and introduced Node.js worker threads to offload blocking work from the event loop. Presented findings to the engineering teams.
- Sole engineer on a Loyalty Programme API acting as middleware between frontend teams, external partners, and Salesforce — covering member tier upgrades, benefit selection, and partner voucher code minting/redemption. Delivered on time with zero post-deployment bug fixes.
- Built Splunk dashboards for real-time monitoring and observability across integration services.
- Worked across an AWS stack including S3, DynamoDB, CDK, and ElasticSearch.
Zebra Labs LTDRemote
Co-Founder / Lead Engineer
Summary
Lead engineer of our primary internal product, OneSea, and senior engineer on "Program Finder" - a product for our client, Erickson Coaching International.
Responsibilities & Achievements
- Led the end-to-end development of OneSea, a SaaS platform tailored for the maritime industry, utilising React, Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Prisma.
- Collaborated within a fully remote team environment, leveraging tools like GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence.
- Architected and implemented robust authentication flows for multi-tenanted web applications.
- Designed and developed consistent, aesthetic, and responsive user interfaces using Tailwind CSS and React.
- Implemented automated testing strategies using Playwright.
- Engineered subscription-based payment systems using Stripe.
- Developed "live dashboards" that provide real-time updates using Supabase.
- Built and deployed an iOS (iPad only) app on the Apple App Store using React Native and Expo.
- Utilised Mixed Integer Programming to solve complex scheduling problems.
- Leveraged Recharts for data visualisation.
Education
University of Cape Town
BSc (Hons) in Mechanical & Mechatronic Engineering
GPA 73.16%
Skills
Projects
OneSea
A SaaS platform providing the maritime industry with a set of tools to manage their vessels and crew.
Program Finder
A platform to find programs, courses and classes provided by Erickson Coaching International
Hobby Projects
findmyregion.com
A simple app to determine the best server region for your next deployment based on the locations of clients.