Ondiek Ochieng/Senior Software Engineer

Building financial infrastructure and intelligent systems that scale.

I design and build digital banking platforms, merchant ecosystems, and cloud-native services — the systems behind products that serve thousands of organizations and move billions in transaction value.

Financial InfrastructureDigital BankingCloud-Native SystemsAI Engineering
View CV

KES 18.5B+

Transaction value supported

Merchant ecosystem

128K+

Merchant organizations enabled

Merchant Enterprise Portal

KES 6.6B+

Business value enabled

Partner Workspace

70K+

Production lines delivered

MySacco Digital Banking

Significant systems I've designed and built — the problem, the architecture, and the scale each one operates at.

Safaricom PLC

Nov 2022 – Present

Senior Software Engineer — via Andela · Nairobi, Kenya

Designing and building financial platforms across M-PESA's merchant and digital-banking ecosystem — from GraphQL orchestration layers over core banking to self-service payment infrastructure.

M-PESA Business Hub

Platform Consolidation
2025 – Present·In active development

Safaricom's merchant tooling had grown across several disconnected portals. I'm building the M-PESA Business Hub — a Next.js and TypeScript monorepo that consolidates these into one platform, unifying authentication, the design system, and merchant workflows while driving feature parity with the existing Merchant Enterprise Portal.

KES 18.5B+

Transaction value supported

5,000+

Organizations supported

  • Monorepo architecture with a shared design system and typed API layer across previously siloed products
  • Incremental migration strategy that preserves 100% feature parity while retiring legacy portals
  • Unified merchant identity and access across consolidated services
Next.jsTypeScriptMonorepoGraphQL

MySacco Digital Banking Platform

Digital Banking
Mar 2023 – Present·In production · Nov 2025

A digital banking platform for SACCOs (savings & credit cooperatives) built on Apache Fineract. I built the GraphQL orchestration layer that coordinates complex financial operations — lending, savings, wallets, and member management — across the platform's services, spanning multiple repositories rather than a single codebase.

70K+

Production LOC

6,151+

Automated tests

95%+

Test coverage

5+

SACCO pilot deployments

  • GraphQL middleware orchestrating multi-step financial operations over Fineract's core banking APIs
  • Five core domains: member management, organization setup, products, administration, and accounting
  • Multi-repository platform with contract testing holding service boundaries stable
  • Live in production and powering active SACCO pilot deployments
Apache FineractGraphQLApollo ServerReactTypeScriptPostgreSQL

Partner Workspace Platform

Credit Infrastructure
2023 – 2024

Partner organizations needed self-service access to Safaricom's credit-scoring data without exposing the underlying pipelines. I built a self-service portal that lets partners onboard, manage admin users, preview queries, and securely interact with credit-scoring data through a JupyterHub integration.

KES 6.6B+

Business value enabled

  • Cleared a nine-month engineering backlog in two weeks
  • Secure, governed access to sensitive credit-scoring data for external partners
  • Powers credit products across Fuliza (KES 1.1B limits), M-Shwari (KES 411M), and KCB M-PESA (KES 5.1B)
ReactNext.jsJupyterHubPython (ML integration)

Merchant Enterprise Portal

Merchant Payments
2023 – 2024

Merchants relied on a costly external vendor for payment reconciliation and management. I built a self-service payment platform on a high-performance Node.js and TypeScript backend handling B2B and B2C flows, reversals, and shortcode management — replacing the vendor entirely.

128,610+

Merchant organizations enabled

KES 15M

Annual operational savings

  • Vendor replacement that removed a recurring third-party dependency
  • B2B/B2C payments, reversals, and shortcode management in a single self-service platform
  • Backend engineered for high-throughput merchant onboarding and reconciliation
Node.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQL

Corner

Deterministic Runtime

Independent product — design & engineering

A hands-free boxing coach for the heavy bag — engineered as a deterministic coaching platform, not an interval timer. A pure, framework-free execution engine (immutable timeline + workout state machine + monotonic event stream) drives a strictly layered runtime where the Engine executes, a Coach layer decides whether/what/when to speak, and a Media layer owns every browser concern behind capability detection. Same workout in, same coaching out — no randomness, no AI.

282

Passing tests

6

Isolated runtime layers

  • Pure, framework-free execution engine — immutable timeline, state machine, and event stream with zero browser or React dependencies
  • Strict layered architecture with one-way data flow; each layer knows nothing of the layers above it (Engine executes · Coach decides · Media delivers)
  • Voice-first, hands-free UX where coaching is a decision: when to teach, when to reinforce in fresh words, and when silence is the right call
  • Browser-runtime resilience — Speech, Web Audio bells, and Wake Lock behind capability detection and graceful degradation; an RAF clock reconciles exact timing across visibility changes
TypeScriptNext.jsReactWeb Speech APIWeb AudioWake Lock APIVitest

Architecture: the Engine executes · the Coach decides · the Media delivers.

MotiiZote

Marketplace Infrastructure

Independent venture — founder & engineer

B2B car-marketplace infrastructure embedded directly in 35+ WhatsApp groups, processing 20–50 listings a day. The core challenge was WhatsApp's fragmented webhook delivery — I built a slot-based queue with Redis buffering to reassemble split messages, plus an AI extraction pipeline tuned for Kenyan car-listing terminology.

  • Slot-based queue with Redis buffering to defragment WhatsApp webhook messages
  • Race-condition handling in concurrent session processing
  • AI extraction pipeline for domain-specific listing terminology
  • Seller verification system · 87%+ test coverage
Node.jsRedisPostgreSQLAWSELK StackWhatsApp Business API

Founder & engineer

E4Impact Enterprise Platform

Enterprise Platform

Independent project

A three-service architecture powering startup-accelerator operations across Africa. I built it end to end — identity management, a dynamic forms engine, and funnel workflow automation — designed so each service owns its domain and scales independently.

Service Architecture

Identity Service

15+

JWT auth, OAuth integration, RBAC, OTP verification

Registration & loginRole & permission managementOAuth providers

Forms Service

25+

Dynamic form builder with multi-language support

Form creation & templatesS3 file attachmentsAuto-translation

Funnels Service

60+

Workflow automation for accelerator pipelines

Multi-tenant funnelsConfigurable roundsEmail campaigns
FastAPIPostgreSQLS3JWTOAuthRedis

Architecture documentation available on request

Multi-Tenant Identity Service

Identity & Access

Open source

An enterprise-grade authentication service: JWT auth, hierarchical RBAC, and true multi-tenancy with per-tenant data isolation, single-device session policy, and comprehensive audit logging — the kind of identity substrate financial platforms are built on.

  • Tenant-scoped queries enforcing hard data isolation between tenants
  • Redis-backed token validation cache for low-latency auth
  • Hierarchical role-based access control
  • Audit logging and one-device session enforcement
FastAPIPostgreSQLRedisJWTDocker

Capabilities grouped by the problems they solve — not a wall of logos.

Financial Infrastructure

Core banking, merchant, and payment systems.

  • Apache Fineract
  • Digital Banking
  • Merchant Platforms
  • Payment Systems
  • Financial APIs

Frontend Systems

Interfaces for complex financial workflows.

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • GraphQL

Backend Systems

Services and APIs that carry the load.

  • FastAPI
  • Spring Boot
  • Node.js
  • Apollo Server

Cloud & Infrastructure

Running systems reliably in production.

  • OpenShift
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • CI/CD

AI Engineering

Agentic systems and LLM-backed tooling.

  • MCP Servers
  • Multi-Agent Systems
  • RAG Systems
  • Claude API
  • n8n Automation

Engineering Practices

How systems stay correct and maintainable.

  • System Design
  • Test Automation
  • Technical Leadership
  • Architecture Documentation
  • Contract Testing
  • Developer Experience

Influence beyond implementation — migrations I've led, documentation teams rely on, and the engineers I help level up.

Apollo Server 4 Migration

Platform migration

Led the migration of the GraphQL layer to Apollo Server 4 across the MySacco platform, modernizing the orchestration tier and removing deprecated middleware ahead of production hardening.

Unblocked production readiness for the digital banking platform

Architecture & Documentation

Documentation

Authored architecture and contract-testing documentation that was adopted organization-wide, giving teams a shared reference for service boundaries and testing standards.

Adopted org-wide as a reference standard

Technical Mentorship

Mentorship

Mentor engineers on testing discipline, system design, and code quality — raising the baseline for how teams reason about correctness and architecture.

Customer Demonstrations

Stakeholder engagement

Present platform capabilities directly to customers and stakeholders, translating engineering work into business outcomes during SACCO pilot rollouts.

Sharing what I learn building systems — with the engineering community across Kenya.

Conference Talks

Contract Testing with Pact

Keeping service boundaries stable across independent teams

Software Quality Conference 2024 · 100+ attendees

Getting Started with the Daraja 2.0 API

Onboarding developers to M-PESA's payment APIs

Safaricom Engineering Summit 2022 · 200+ attendees

Effective Testing of Python Applications with Pytest

Practical testing patterns for production Python

PyCon Kenya 2022 · 50+ attendees

Community

AWS Community Builder

Amazon Web Services

Aug 2022 – Mar 2023 · Front-End Web & Mobile