Jean Ochieng

S

Director of Engineering at Takealot | ex-PwC

Takealot
Nairobi, Kenya · EAT (UTC+3)
12+ years experience
University of Cape Town
English, Swahili
Advising
Messaging unavailable

Overview

I lead distributed databases at Takealot in Nairobi. Brought on-call pages for storage down from 16 a week to 3. Moved 71% of storage traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident. Before that: PwC and Naspers. Most at home with consensus and VS Code extensions. Yoga every morning.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Advice on distributed databases
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
Please don't message about
  • Crypto token projects
  • Requests to fix your code for free

Prefers short, specific messages

Skills
RaftVS Code extensionsconsensusperformance engineering
AdvisingOpen to advising
closes in 3 months

Office hours for students choosing a first job: distributed databases and VS Code extensions

Topics
distributed databases, consensus, performance engineering
Format
Async reviews
Terms
Free for early founders
Capacity
One advisory role at a time
Best for
Seed to Series A teams

21 years of distributed databases. Can review plans, decks and hiring loops.

Nairobi, Kenya · remote OKraftperformance engineeringconsensus
Open

Experience

  1. Director of Engineering
    Apr 2025 - Present
    Takealot · 1 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
    • Mentored 6 engineers through their first promotion.
    • Wrote the VS Code extensions service that now handles 22 million requests a day.
  2. Senior Engineering Manager
    Feb 2022 - Apr 2025
    PwC · 3 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
    • Brought on-call pages for storage down from 13 a week to 1.
    • Cut p99 latency on the storage services from 751ms to 77ms.
  3. Principal Engineer
    May 2018 - Feb 2022
    Naspers · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
    • Led or co-led 33 investments, 3 of them now at Series B or later.
  4. Principal Engineer
    Jul 2016 - May 2018
    Mastercard · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
    • Sit on 3 boards.
  5. Senior Software Engineer
    Dec 2014 - May 2016
    Meta · 1 yr 5 mo · Full-time · Nairobi, Kenya
    • Moved 71% of storage traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.

Projects

Open-source consensus toolkit
2025

A small library for distributed databases that 809 developers star on GitHub.

Write-up: distributed databases in practice
2024

A long-form guide to distributed databases for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of Cape Town
    BSc, Computer Engineering
    2001 - 2005

Details

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