Lwazi Govender

Overview

I've spent 22 years on API platforms - first at Safaricom, now at Granite Robotics. Reduced cloud spend on public API by 45% in two quarters. Moved 83% of public API traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident. Before that: MTN and Google. I read too many books about cities.

Best reached early in the week

Experience

1. CTO

   Sep 2025 - Present
   Granite Robotics · 1 yr 1 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
   • Mentored 12 engineers through their first promotion.
   • Wrote the Python service that now handles 77 million requests a day.
2. Staff Backend Engineer

   Sep 2023 - Sep 2025
   MTN · 2 yr · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
   • Built the experimentation framework 6 product teams use to ship changes safely.
   • Shipped 22 launches on the public API team without a rollback.
3. Backend Engineer

   Dec 2019 - Sep 2023
   Google · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
   • Cut p99 latency on the public API services from 478ms to 137ms.
4. Senior Backend Engineer

   Mar 2016 - Dec 2019
   Paystack · 3 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
   • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 34 minutes to under 4.
   • Led the migration of 31 services to Python.
5. Senior Engineering Manager

   Nov 2014 - Mar 2016
   Safaricom · 1 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Cape Town, South Africa
   • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 23 minutes to under 4.
   • Mentored 9 engineers through their first promotion.

No references yet.

Education

1. University of Nairobi

   BSc, Mathematics
   1999 - 2003