Cynthia Owino

Engineering Manager at Absa · Payments infrastructure · PostgreSQL, idempotency

Absa

Nairobi, Kenya · EAT (UTC+3)

10+ years experience

Strathmore University

English, Swahili

Open to work

Messaging unavailable

Overview

Currently at Absa, where I lead payments infrastructure with a team of 37. Built the experimentation framework 37 product teams use to ship changes safely. Grew the payments platform team from 3 to 14 engineers. Most at home with gRPC and idempotency. Jazz piano, badly.

Good reasons to reach out

Roles in payments infrastructure
Questions about payments infrastructure
Thoughtful intros to people in my field

Please don't message about

Generic networking requests
Crypto token projects

Best reached early in the week

Skills

distributed systemsKafkaPostgreSQLPCI DSSidempotencygRPCGo

Open to workLooking for a role

closes in 3 months

Staff Backend Engineer roles in supply chain - Nairobi or remote

Target roles: Staff Backend Engineer
Level: Staff / Principal
Industries: E-commerce, Consumer apps
Work mode: Remote
Available: 30 days notice
Work authorization: Authorized to work in Kenya
What I'm looking for: Scope to lead payments infrastructure work, with a manager who gives direct feedback.
Not interested in: Night shifts

10 years in payments infrastructure. Strongest at distributed systems and idempotency. Serving notice now.

Nairobi, Kenyakafkadistributed systemspostgresql

Open

Experience

Engineering Manager
Aug 2024 - Present
Absa · 2 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
- Wrote the distributed systems service that now handles 5 million requests a day.
- Brought on-call pages for payments platform down from 18 a week to 2.
Senior Backend Engineer
Jan 2021 - Aug 2024
Takealot · 3 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
- Took payment success rates from 95.4% to 98.9%.
- Grew the payments platform team from 3 to 18 engineers.
Senior Backend Engineer
Jul 2019 - Jan 2021
GTBank · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
- Led the migration of 75 services to idempotency.
Backend Engineer
Oct 2016 - Jul 2019
Safaricom · 2 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
- Designed the reconciliation system that matches 2 million transactions a day.
- Reduced cloud spend on payments platform by 29% in two quarters.

References

No references yet.

Education

Strathmore University
BCom, Electrical Engineering
2012 - 2016

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What they are targeting for their next role.

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