Engineering and technology leader with 15+ years designing and scaling distributed fintech systems across Africa, still hands-on across backend development, cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, and production reliability. Built and led distributed engineering teams across Africa and India, shipped payments and banking platforms used by hundreds of thousands of people, and works with AI coding agents and LLMs daily. Comfortable owning architecture, delivery, and the code itself.
Core Competencies
Languages & Backend
Java (Spring Boot), Python (Django/FastAPI), TypeScript/Node.js, Go; distributed systems, microservices, API design, GraphQL, event- and domain-driven architecture, SQL & data modeling
Gamified learning platform built on the Kenyan CBC curriculum, with contest and leaderboard features.
Chairman of the Board at goal4.orgJul 2025 – Present
Chair the board of a nonprofit delivering maternal and child health programs in Sega, Kenya, providing governance oversight and strategic direction
Guide funding strategy and program priorities across Mothers' Education, Safe Birth, and Special Projects initiatives
Head of Engineering at Choice BankJul 2024 – Jul 2025
Led engineering teams building API banking infrastructure for African fintech platforms
Stayed hands-on: wrote and reviewed infrastructure-as-code, set CI/CD and deployment standards, and served as senior escalation authority for production incidents and root-cause analysis
Delivered AI-driven internal and customer-facing tools; owned architecture, reliability, and scaling of digital banking systems
Chief Technology Officer at Koa (Lotus)May 2022 – Jul 2024
Led engineering for a consumer savings platform serving hundreds of thousands of users
Architected and built the AWS environment hands-on (EKS, IAM, VPC, SNS/SQS), wrote and managed Terraform IaC, built CI/CD pipelines, and led incident response and production reliability
Directed the pivot to Lotus, a Banking-as-a-Service platform for SMEs: payments, spend management, ERP integrations, and public APIs
Owned technical strategy, infrastructure, and hiring; built and mentored the engineering team
Beyonic → Onafriq2016 – May 2022
One continuous tenure through acquisition, across three roles of increasing scope.
Technical Director, Partner Tools2020 – May 2022
Led post-acquisition technical integration of Beyonic into Onafriq's pan-African payments network
Managed distributed engineering teams of up to 25, including tech leads, engineers, and QA across Africa and India, while remaining hands-on in architecture, DevOps, and delivery
Technical Director2019 – 2020
Led engineering and product roadmap through the acquisition by Onafriq
Built scalable payment APIs and improved CI/CD and infrastructure reliability
Senior Software Engineer2016 – 2018
Designed and built payment APIs and mobile money integrations, including M-PESA, over SMS and USSD rails
Contributed to platform scalability during rapid regional expansion
Senior Software Engineer at Code for Africa2012 – 2015
Built backend systems and mobile applications leveraging open government data
Developed tools supporting data-driven journalism across East Africa
Senior Software Engineer at Open Institute2013
Developed data-driven platforms supporting civic transparency and open data initiatives