Senior Manager, Software, Food4Education
Nairobi, Kenya
National scale, built on feature phones.
I lead the platform that settles half a million school-meal transactions every school day at Food4Education — on infrastructure built for a million, for parents who mostly use feature phones.
Let's talk about what you're working on
These are the problems that fill my weeks. If one of them is filling yours too, or you are stuck somewhere I have already been stuck, I would like to hear how it is going. Most of what I know came from someone telling me how they got it wrong.
Payments and identity at scale
How do you settle half a million payments a school day when most parents are on feature phones and the network drops in the middle of service? M-Pesa STK Push, QR and automated reconciliation, NFC wristbands, USSD, and the offline tolerance all of it has to have.
Platform scale and reliability
What actually breaks when a single VPS serving 350,000 meals a day has to become infrastructure built for a million. JVM and heap tuning, near-zero-downtime migrations across GCP and AWS, and monitoring that finds the problem before the schools do.
Automation that gets used
Getting tools into daily use across an organisation instead of buying licences and hoping. Internal Slack and AppSheet automation, a WhatsApp assistant for parents, and the training and follow-up that decide whether any of it survives its first week.
Agentic systems in real operations
Where an agent genuinely takes work off a queue, and where it quietly adds risk instead. Scoping what it may touch, what it must hand to a person, and how you reconstruct afterwards what it actually did and why.
Escalation and the support path
What happens at 11 a.m. when a serving terminal fails in a school three counties away and lunch is in forty minutes. Tiering, ownership and response times, and an escalation matrix people follow under pressure rather than read once.
Data trust by default
Treating a parent record as something to protect before it is something to query. Access control, leaver processes, retention and least privilege, with Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019 as a design input rather than a compliance afterthought.
Technology strategy
Deciding what to build, what to buy and what to stop doing, then explaining the decision to a board and a programme team in plain language rather than architecture diagrams. Most of the hard part is sequencing, not choosing.
Engineering and IT leadership
How a two-person team becomes a platform organisation, and what it costs to run IT operations, support and security alongside delivery. Governance and documentation included, because field adoption depends on them.
Talks I've given
Inviting me to speak
Put these in the email and I can give you a straight answer quickly:
- Who is in the room, and roughly how many
- The date, and how long you want me for
- The format — talk, panel, workshop or fireside
- What you want people to leave able to do
- Whether it will be recorded or written up
If I am not the right person for it, I will say so.
I speak about building payments and identity infrastructure for the people most platforms are not designed for: feature phones, patchy networks, and a forty-minute window nobody can move.
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Shamiri Summit 2026 Thursday 12 November 2026
Built Not to Break: Tech That Holds at Scale
Technology track · Glee Hotel, Nairobi
What I can speak about
- Building for the feature phone: USSD, low-network design, and why over 90% of our parents never see an app.
- The 40-minute lunch rush: designing for a hard concurrency window you cannot move.
- Moving 60,000 parents and 1.5 million records off a third-party provider in 12 weeks, without losing a meal.
- Running engineering, IT and security together in a mission-driven organisation.
The record
2017 – November 2026Building technology in Kenya since 2017, from internships and my own software lab to leading software, IT and support for a national school feeding programme. Winner of the Microsoft Hackathon Kenya 2023 at the Microsoft Africa Development Centre.
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Food4Education
Senior Manager, Software
Aug 2025 to present
Senior Software Engineer
Jan 2024 to Aug 2025
Software Engineer
Jan 2023 to Feb 2024
Junior Software Engineer
Mar 2022 to Jan 2023
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4M Consulting
Founder
Jun 2017 to Jun 2022
Writing
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What are you working on?
If you are building something under real constraints — unreliable networks, tight budgets, users nobody else designs for — I would like to hear about it. Tell me what you are working on, and what is turning out to be harder than it looked.