Portrait of Martin Omwenga — Martin Omwenga, Nairobi.

Profile

Four years, four industries, one habit: shipping the infrastructure too

Martin Omwenga is a fullstack and platform engineer in Nairobi. He builds production systems, and the Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD that ship them, and leads a small team from client requirements to release.

Experience

4 years

Currently

Tech lead

Time zone

GMT+3

The work has moved across B2B e-commerce, decentralized finance, education and ride-sharing, but it keeps ending in the same place: the API, and the platform under it. At his current company, a small software firm serving European B2B clients, he leads backend and platform engineering: the ordering and CRM system, its sync with a Sage ERP, the Kubernetes cluster it runs on, and the pipelines that deploy it.

Some of what that looks like in practice: a preview environment for every pull request, torn down when it closes; secrets moved out of CI into a dedicated manager after an access-control review; a production order mismatch traced and fixed within three hours; and an AI assistant, with an agent loop and retrieval, running in production.

Career

Jun 2024 – now

Fullstack Engineer & Tech Lead, a software company serving European B2B clientsLeads backend and platform engineering for a B2B e-commerce and CRM system: APIs, real-time chat and cart, a two-way Sage ERP sync, Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD. Leads two to three engineers, from client requirements to release.

NestJS · MongoDB · Next.js · React Native · Kubernetes · Terraform

2022 – 2024

Backend engineer, event-driven microservices (contract)Node.js microservices handling more than 10,000 requests a minute, with Kafka for asynchronous processing and schemas designed for scale.

Node.js · Kafka

2022 – 2024

Protocol engineer, a decentralized yield platform (contract)Eight months as a core engineer: Solidity vault contracts with batching and caching that cut gas costs, and a Next.js app with wallet integration.

Solidity · TypeScript · Next.js

2022 – 2024

Full-stack engineer, an exam-preparation platform (contract)Long-running delivery for a Spanish education platform: admin and student portals, assessment systems and CI, sustained over several years.

Vue · Laravel

2022 – 2024

Full-stack engineer, a ride-sharing MVP (contract)Built from scratch and launched to about 5,000 users, with ride matching, payments, verification and real-time chat.

React Native · TypeScript · PostgreSQL

Toolbox

Platform & cloudKubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS, DigitalOcean, GitHub Actions, Infisical, Prometheus and Grafana

BackendNode.js with NestJS and Express, TypeScript, Python, Go; REST and GraphQL; Kafka and BullMQ

Data & integrationsPostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL; Sage ERP adapters; OpenAI embeddings and retrieval pipelines

Testing & releaseJest, Playwright, Testcontainers; release coordination, QA and client sign-off

Education

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

January 2024

BSc Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering

University of Nairobi · 2021 – 2026

Software Engineering Diploma (accelerated)

ALX / African Leadership University · 2021

Diploma in Data Analytics

Udacity, via African Leadership University

Contact Get in touch Based in Nairobi (GMT+3), with a full overlap with European working hours.

omwenga.mrtn@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub