Engineer-Turned-Leader

Engineering Lead who never stopped shipping

I currently lead a team of 7 as Head of Engineering, and I'm still hands-on with the production systems. I own payment integrations & infrastructure, design backend architecture, and maintain cloud systems carrying real production load. I also lead work on LLM pipelines, RAG systems, and agentic AI.

Watchdock uptime dashboard monitoring six live production sites

Watchdock incidents dashboard showing 3,030 resolved infrastructure incidents

Watchdock container fleet view tracking 30 healthy Docker containers

Watchdock nginx logs dashboard parsing 6.3 million captured requests

Watchdock server detail view with live CPU, memory, and 24-hour heartbeat

Watchdock error tracking dashboard with issue volume and top errors

Watchdock AI suggestion diagnosing the root cause of a production error

Transaction feed with 748 real M-Pesa transactions

Model inference detail showing feature weights and class probabilities behind a category prediction

Ask AI panel answering questions grounded in real transaction data

Annual report with year-over-year spending comparison and category breakdown

Custom date range report comparing spending against the prior period, with AI-written analysis

Saved report configurations that run on a schedule or on demand

Autonomous agents watching budgets and flagging anomalies on a schedule

Trusted With Real Money

I've shipped and run integrations across seven distinct payment rails, from Stripe and Basis Theory to M-Pesa and direct bank APIs. When a Stripe manual capture fault was quietly leaking revenue, I diagnosed it and restored 100% automated processing, live today for hundreds of thousands of users across Kenya and Tanzania.

StripeGlobal card payments & subscriptions

Basis TheoryTokenization, PCI scope reduction

IntaSendMobile money & card payments (Kenya)

Safaricom M-PesaMobile money at national scale

DTB BankDirect bank integration

I&M BankDirect bank integration

NBC Bank TanzaniaCross-border banking rails

Building Teams That Don't Depend On Me

I was promoted to Head of Engineering and inherited a team with no formal process. I built one, then got out of the way. The goal was never to make myself the bottleneck, it was to build an organisation that runs on process, not on me.

7 engineersBackend, frontend, mobile, and design, led hands-on

2 podsProduct Delivery and Platform Stability

20 workstreamsRunning under one PDLC framework

Monthly to weeklyDelivery cycle time after introducing 1-week sprints

Shipped In The Open

Leadership hasn't slowed the craft down. I design and publish open source Python packages that other engineers install and depend on, proof that the systems thinking extends beyond any single job or team.

daraja-sdkTyped, async-first Python SDK for M-Pesa's Daraja API kenyan-countiesKenya's 47 counties and wards as Pydantic and Django models watchdock-errorsError tracking SDK with built-in PII scrubbing watchdock-agent-sdkLightweight Python agent that collects and forwards system metrics, Docker container data, and nginx/log entries to the WatchDock dashboard

Selected Projects

Watchdock

DashboardMonitoring

Monitoring and observability tool that tracks servers, applications, logs, and websites in real time.

My Finance AI

Personal FinanceMachine Learning

Personal finance SaaS that parses M-Pesa and bank statements, then categorizes and forecasts spend with a per-user Random Forest model at 92.4% accuracy in production.