DanielMalungu
> whoami

Daniel Malungu

Senior Data & AI Infrastructure Engineer — 9+ years building production data platforms and self-hosted AI infrastructure, from national land registries to agentic legal-AI systems.

Nairobi, Kenya · Open to senior remote roles
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01 / About

Building platforms that hold up under real load

I'm currently Lead Data Engineer at ArdhiSasa, Kenya's national land management platform, where I own the full data stack: PostgreSQL 17 at scale, ETL pipelines for land transaction digitization, PeerDB change data capture, CI/CD pipelines, and production infrastructure on Rocky Linux and Docker Compose. The platform handles the digitization of millions of official government land records.

In October 2024 I founded Sheria Platform, an AI-powered judicial intelligence system for Kenya's court system, built entirely from scratch — combining a LangGraph agentic RAG pipeline, Qdrant vector search, Neo4j citation graph traversal, and self-hosted Ollama inference. It was shortlisted in Kenya's NIRU National AI Hackathon 2025 (Governance & Policy track) from 2,467 proposals out of 5,656 national registrants.

My core expertise spans PostgreSQL administration, CDC replication, LangGraph agentic pipelines, vector databases, dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, self-hosted LLM inference, GitHub Actions, and Linux server hardening. I'm open to senior remote roles in data engineering, platform engineering, or AI infrastructure with US or EU-based teams.

// quick_facts.json
Location
Nairobi, Kenya (remote-friendly)
Experience
9+ years
Current role
Lead Data Engineer, ArdhiSasa
Focus areas
Data platforms, AI/RAG infrastructure, full stack engineering
Availability
Open to senior remote roles (US/EU teams)
02 / Skills

Core technical skills

Data Engineering

  • PostgreSQL 17
  • PeerDB CDC
  • Apache Airflow
  • dbt (Kimball modeling)
  • Snowflake
  • ETL / ELT
  • Python
  • SQL

AI / ML Infrastructure

  • LangGraph
  • Ollama
  • Qdrant
  • Neo4j
  • FastAPI
  • RAG systems
  • Semantic caching
  • ColBERT / RAGatouille

DevOps & Infrastructure

  • Docker Compose
  • Rocky Linux
  • nginx
  • GitHub Actions
  • MinIO
  • Prometheus
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Nagios / ELK

Development

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • FastAPI
  • TensorFlow
  • Django REST Framework
  • JWT RBAC
  • Microservices
03 / Experience

Where I've built

Lead Data Engineer

ArdhiSasa

– Present · Nairobi, Kenya

  • 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
  • Hardened production databases with SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication, audit triggers, and automated backup scripts across 31+ databases
  • 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
  • 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
  • Served as Scrum Master for the data engineering team — sprint planning, backlog grooming, and agile coaching
  • PostgreSQL 17
  • PeerDB
  • Airflow
  • Python
  • dbt
  • Airbyte
  • MinIO
  • Docker Compose
  • GitHub Actions
  • Rocky Linux
  • nginx
  • Nagios
  • ELK Stack

Founder & Lead Engineer

Sheria Platform

– Present · Independent Project

  • Shortlisted from 2,467 proposals across 5,656 national registrants — NIRU National AI Hackathon 2025, Governance & Policy track
  • Architected a 3-node Ollama GPU inference cluster (RTX 3050s) running Qwen2.5:7b — fully self-hosted with no external API dependency
  • Built a LangGraph agentic RAG pipeline: Planner → Retriever → Responder with IRAC legal prompting and streaming NDJSON responses
  • Implemented semantic caching (Qdrant + Redis, cosine > 0.95, 30-day TTL) to reduce redundant inference
  • Qdrant vector search across Kenya Law Reports with a Neo4j citation graph (CITES, OVERRULES, DISTINGUISHES relationships)
  • FastAPI microservices with JWT RBAC, Prometheus metrics, and OpenTelemetry tracing
  • M-Pesa STK Push payments via Safaricom Daraja API with a FastAPI callback on Railway
  • Next.js streaming frontend with admin panel, ingestion job monitor, and health dashboard
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • LangGraph
  • Ollama
  • Qdrant
  • Neo4j
  • PostgreSQL
  • MinIO
  • Next.js
  • Docker Compose
  • Redis

Data Engineer

CloudFactory

– · Kenya (concurrent with ArdhiSasa engagement)

  • Led full migration of all data pipelines from Xplenty to Prefect orchestration on AWS EC2 — achieving centralized logging and significant cost reduction
  • Wrote dbt transformations following the Kimball dimensional modelling approach for an enterprise Snowflake data warehouse
  • Built a CI pipeline from scratch in GitHub Actions for automated dbt model testing and fast feedback for contributors
  • Introduced SQLFluff for automated SQL quality enforcement, improving team delivery speed by 80%
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • Prefect
  • Python
  • SQL
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS EC2
  • SQLFluff

Full Stack Software Engineer

Olive Technologies

– · Nairobi, Kenya

  • Built a chatbot system for back-office customer support using TensorFlow, deployed on a microservices architecture
  • Developed and launched an online academic marketplace, growing it to 200+ active users from zero
  • Designed deployment architecture using microservices principles for scalability and maintainability
  • Python
  • TensorFlow
  • SQL
  • Microservices

Software Engineer

Open Arch Systems

– · Nairobi, Kenya

  • Built a smart water meter system on an IoT/NB-IoT platform with bi-directional communication between field sensors and back-office
  • Reduced water losses for two water utility companies by 30% through real-time sensor-based incident detection
  • Python
  • Django REST Framework
  • PyQt
  • NB-IoT
05 / Education

Education & Certifications

Education

MSc Data Analytics

KCA University –

BSc Information Technology

KCA University –

Diploma in Business Management

Kenya Institute of Management –

Certifications

TensorFlow Developer Certification

Google Mobile Academy –
06 / Awards

Awards & Recognition

NIRU National AI Hackathon 2025

Shortlisted from 2,467 proposals (5,656 total registrants) in the Governance & Policy track. Advanced to the prototyping and mentorship phase. Backed by Safaricom, Equity Bank, KCB, Strathmore University, and USIU-Africa.

07 / Writing

From the Blog

View all posts →

08 / Contact

Let's talk

Open to senior remote roles in data engineering, platform engineering, or AI infrastructure. The fastest way to reach me is email.

Email daniel@danielmalungu.dev Phone +254 721 555 986 LinkedIn in/danielkmalungu GitHub DKMalungu Instagram @dkmalungu TikTok @kijana_wa_kathonzweni X @daniel_malungu
Download CV