Lead Data Engineer & Product Owner
ArdhiSasa- Product owner for the EDMS (our in-house digitization platform), the database infrastructure, and the data warehouse and pipelines — running the backlog and priorities for Land Registry (digitizing registry documents and designing how land records from the older regimes, such as GLA, are brought into the LRA 2012 regime), Land Administration, ministry management, the Auditor-General's office, and the digitizing staff
- During the COVID lockdown, requested through the CS and PS that digitization move to full capacity; by the end of 2021 all physical files in the registry had been captured
- Advocated a single parcel reference number across all departments (the same parcel previously carried a different file number in each) and built the router engine to convert between them; it is now the ministry's standard
- Lead a team of eight (analyst, 2 data engineers, DBA, tester, 2 backend developers, 1 frontend developer): sat on the hiring panel for our Data Engineer, built an onboarding programme for 4+ new members covering our architecture, languages, frameworks and tools, encourage dbt certification, and run quarterly performance reviews
- Scrum Master on two-week sprints with a release per sprint; track individual and team effectiveness with velocity charts, daily scrum, sprint retrospectives and defect rate
- Platform runs to a 99.95% monthly uptime SLA (99.99% internal SLO) with a 15-minute RTO and 5-minute RPO, backed by automatic failover, 5-minute transaction log backups and quarterly DR tests
- Led ArdhiSasa through a national audit by the Office of the Auditor-General covering documentation, user guides, development workflow and methodology, architecture and implementation, and security practices — receiving a positive assessment in the Auditor-General's report on the State Department for Lands and Physical Planning for the year ended 30 June 2025
- Designed and administer PostgreSQL 17 production clusters with hybrid master-replica topology using repmgr HA and PgBouncer connection pooling
- Scaled cluster throughput from 1,000 TPS to 10,000 TPS through architectural redesign and query optimization
- Implemented SCRAM-SHA-256 password encryption across PostgreSQL clusters so the database never handles raw passwords during user creation or rotation, paired with audit triggers and automated backup scripts across 31+ databases
- Implemented S3-based long-term archival of database backups, VM security logs, application logs, and database logs to meet Kenya's statutory data retention requirements
- Defended the platform against an active attack by enforcing end-to-end TLS across every service hop — client-to-server, database connections, and support tooling such as Mattermost and pgAdmin — and restructured credential access around HashiCorp Vault for system-critical authentication
- Built and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines in Python, Apache Airflow, and SQL for land transaction and records data
- Implemented PeerDB change data capture replication from production OLTP to data warehouse with custom schema mapping
- Architected the data warehouse on Data Vault 2.0 and grew data engineering from a non-existent BI function into a fully independent team delivering all of ArdhiSasa's BI, visualization, and reporting on system-generated data for decision makers
- Led digitization of 5 million+ land records through a custom EDMS including a bulk document ingestion ETL tool
- Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated data pipeline testing and production deployments; led the migration of the deployment platform from Docker Swarm to a fully self-hosted, on-premises Kubernetes cluster to improve service delivery
- Improved database observability by rolling out pghero, pgBadger, and pgwatch for query performance monitoring, log analysis, and error tracing across production clusters
- Scrum
- Product Ownership
- PostgreSQL 17
- PeerDB
- Airflow
- Python
- dbt
- Airbyte
- MinIO
- Docker Compose
- GitHub Actions
- Rocky Linux
- nginx
- Nagios
- ELK Stack
- TLS
- HashiCorp Vault
- Data Vault 2.0
- Kubernetes
- pgHero
- pgBadger
- pgwatch
- AWS S3