James

Nairobi, Kenya

Senior full-stack developer with 10+ years building business-critical systems in PHP/Laravel and Vue.js, plus Node.js and cloud-native services. I have built inventory, accounting, approval-workflow, billing, and reporting platforms for finance and operations teams, owning them from PR to Docker deployment. I've led engineering teams and re-architected a serverless platform handling 50M+ events/day at sub-100ms p99, cutting cloud spend by 40%.

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Work experience

Senior Software Development Engineer, Pilgrim Consulting Group

Nov 2022 — Jun 2026

Senior engineer on Heatmap.com's analytics engine, built on AWS serverless (Lambda, Kinesis, DynamoDB). Scaled it to 50M+ daily events at sub-100ms p99 latency and cut AWS spend by 40% while improving reliability. Built a GDPR-compliant tracking layer and a Shadow DOM-aware session recorder, and led code standards and reviews. Used Cursor and other AI-native IDEs for accelerated development, and Claude Projects for team docs and onboarding.

Software Developer, Doyen Systems

May 2016 — Sep 2018

Delivered 5+ full-stack client applications in Laravel, Zend, and CodeIgniter on deadline, with zero critical production defects after launch.

Lead Software Engineer, Cyfras Technologies (CFT)

Jan 2013 — Feb 2023

Lead Software Engineer at Cyfras Technologies (CFT), leading 6+ engineers across 4 enterprise product lines. Built a Laravel and Vue.js bulk SMS and CRM platform (millions of messages monthly, 99.9% delivery SLA), SACCO member portals in Vue.js, credit management systems with automated M-Pesa disbursement (~70% less manual processing), the CFT Cloud multi-tenant ERP, and the Kenversity banking platform with Ionic app and USSD gateway.

Education

BSc. Computer Technology — Technical University of Kenya

Jan 2012 — Dec 2015

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