Mithun Sivanesan
Software Engineer with experience in systems, cloud, and data infrastructure
What I am doing now
Currently doing my final semester of my undergraduate degree in Software Engineering at the University of Newcastle, and working as a DevOps Engineer at DTS (Digital Technology Solutions), the University of Newcastle's internal IT department.
Experience
Research Assistant
Developed an MVP for the Heavy Matters SaaS platform (see below).
DevOps Engineering Assistant
Led development of secure data ingestion pipelines in Microsoft Fabric so a legacy analytics platform could be decommissioned.
Senior Team Member
Led the port of the NUbots RoboCup codebase to a new Booster K1 humanoid, coordinating the toolchain, sensor, and inference work that got it competing at RoboCup.
Selected work
Heavy Matters
CompletedBuilt the MVP for the Heavy Matters portal, where a YOLO-based vision pipeline classifies resident-submitted kerbside waste photos to drive collection route optimisation. Architected the full stack on AWS, with the backend running on ECS Fargate with RDS, S3, Cognito, and SQS, to a pilot target of 40,000 total users, 4,000 active, and 1,000 concurrent.
- React
- Next.js
- Express
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- YOLO
- AWS
- ECS Fargate
- RDS
- S3
- Cognito
- SQS
- Lambda
NUbots Booster K1 Platform Port
Led the port of the NUbots RoboCup codebase and the NUsight visualisation tool to a newly acquired Booster K1 platform with a Jetson Orin NX compute board. Work included the cross-compilation toolchain that builds for the ARM-based Jetson from x86-based machines, a ROS 2 bridge that allows the codebase to interact with the robot's camera via shared memory, and a refactor of the YOLO inference pipeline to use TensorRT for GPU acceleration.
- C++
- Python
- TypeScript
- CMake
- ROS 2
- Docker
- Linux
server_auth
Multi-factor authentication over SMTP, written for a System and Network Security course assessment.
- Python
Side projects
spotify-player
A simple playback controller built on Spotify's Web API that I developed in order to teach myself TypeScript and React.
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- React
AO3Bookify
Turns a fanfiction link from Archive of Our Own into a PDF you can actually read on an e-reader.
- Python
LiS-MapImport
A Blender script that imports .umap (Unreal Engine map files) from the video game Life is Strange: Remastered.
- Python
- Blender
How I work
Languages
Sorted in no particular order, but I have a fondness for C++ and Python, and an appreciation for Java as it's the first language I learned.
- TypeScript/JavaScript
- C++
- Java
- C#
- Python
- Lua
- Bash
Frontend
Built and shipped the frontends for Heavy Matters and this site.
- Next.js
- React
- TailwindCSS
Backend
Have done plenty of work in this space in both university and industry (and is where I'm most comfortable).
- Express.js
- Spring Boot
Data
Built secure ingestion pipelines in Microsoft Fabric to replace a legacy analytics platform.
- Microsoft Fabric
- PySpark
- SQL
Build Systems
Most of my time is spent waiting 2 hours for a Docker image to build (part of the job, unfortunately).
- CMake
- Gradle
- Maven
- npm
- uv
Infrastructure
Architected and deployed the AWS backend behind Heavy Matters, plus the CI and hosting for this site.
- AWS
- Docker
- Linux
- Bash
Machine Learning
Built computer vision pipelines with YOLO and PyTorch, including image classification feeding a production routing system.
- PyTorch
- YOLO
Education
Bachelor of Software Engineering (Honours), University of Newcastle
Feb 2023 - Nov 2026 [6.1 / 7.0 GPA]
- Commendation List 2023
- Commendation List 2024
Coursework in Data Structures & Algorithms, Data Security, Enterprise Software Architectures, Machine Intelligence.