A practical breakdown of database fundamentals beyond the textbook definitions — consistency models, isolation levels, and how indexes actually behave under load.
I lead the data infrastructure, AIOps, and cloud engineering function at Aga Khan University, with 12 years building and running production data platforms across AWS, Azure, and GCP for distributed teams in Kenya and Pakistan. My MedGemma-based clinical decision support work, grounded in Kenyan Ministry of Health guidelines, was recognized through the Google GenAI Accelerator Award.
My platform work increasingly sits at the intersection of data engineering and AI. I have built feature engineering pipelines that reduced model-ready dataset preparation time by 30% for data science teams, implemented statistical anomaly detection for proactive data quality monitoring, and architected data infrastructure supporting LLM and intelligent automation workflows. I build the data foundation that makes AI and analytics trustworthy, scalable, and production-ready.
Core areas of focus
- Enterprise Data Platform Ownership
- Decision & Analytics Infrastructure
- Data Reliability, Observability & Governance
- AI & ML-Enabling Data Architecture
- Streaming & Real-Time Data Architecture
- Platform Modernization & Cost Optimization
Latest writings
What I Learned Building RAG Systems for Healthcare in East Africa
Lessons from designing retrieval-augmented generation for clinical decision support in resource-constrained environments.
Cutting Streaming Costs Without Cutting Corners
Practical patterns for reducing Kafka and Pub/Sub costs without sacrificing reliability.
Lakehouse Patterns for Multi-Country Research Data
Lakehouse architecture for research collaboration across Kenya, South Africa, and the US.
Featured projects
Afya-Sahihi
MedGemma clinical decision support for Kenyan healthcare professionals. Python
Kafka-Backed-Petabyte-Scale-Web-Multimodal-Data-Acquisition-Pipeline
Distributed crawl, extract, deduplicate pipeline at petabyte scale.
dissertation_hpc_energy_repo
AI-Driven Workload and Energy Optimization for Exascale Computing. Python
Writings
Notes from building data platforms and applied AI in production. Links point only to published pieces.
Published
In progress
What I Learned Building RAG Systems for Healthcare in East AfricaDraft
Lessons from designing retrieval-augmented generation for clinical decision support in resource-constrained environments.
Cutting Streaming Costs Without Cutting CornersDraft
Practical patterns for reducing Kafka and Pub/Sub costs without sacrificing reliability.
Lakehouse Patterns for Multi-Country Research DataDraft
Lakehouse architecture for research collaboration across Kenya, South Africa, and the US.
Building a Real-Time Fitbit Streaming PipelineDraft
Streaming physiological data for 600+ research participants across multiple countries.
Drafts are unpublished and intentionally unlinked. Published pieces appear under Published above as they go live.
Projects
Open source work across data infrastructure, healthcare AI, ML systems, and cloud-native platforms.
Healthcare AI
Afya-Sahihi
Python
MedGemma-based clinical decision support system for Kenyan healthcare professionals.
Local LLM experimentation for Afya clinical AI.
Code audit and quality review for the Afya Gemma production system.
Data Platforms & Engineering
Production-grade distributed pipeline: crawl, render, extract, filter, deduplicate at petabyte scale.
Kafka to Flink streaming pipeline with Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL for e-commerce.
Data architecture using RedHat OpenShift for orchestration pipeline.
Serverless data processing platform with auto-scaling analytics.
Legacy SQL to Snowflake-style warehouse migration: schema, ETL, query conversion, and validation.
Distributed backend service for personalized content feed ranking based on engagement signals.
apacheflink-streaming
Python
Streaming data pipelines from e-commerce infrastructure using Apache Flink.
★ 1
ML, AI Agents & LLM Infrastructure
Agent-Arena
Shell
AI agent experimentation and benchmarking arena.
Multi-agent system that assists developers by planning tasks, generating code, and executing workflows.
AI coding assistant designed for navigating and working with large repositories.
Multimodal AI agent platform with tool-use capabilities.
Scalable AI chat backend with built-in experimentation framework.
Distributed conversation memory and personalization for AI agents.
Intelligent expense automation platform.
ai-policy-platform
Python
AI policy analysis and governance platform.
LLM analytics and telemetry platform for monitoring and observability.
Follow-through implementation of Yuan Tang's Distributed ML Patterns.
MLOps & Model Serving
Distributed feature store and model serving platform.
Distributed training data checkpointing and runtime.
Jukebox-Inc-MLOps-Architecture
TypeScript
Data ingestion architecture for Jukebox with MLOps patterns.
★ 1
AI performance engineering patterns and benchmarks.
Distributed search metrics and debugging platform.
Research & HPC
dissertation_hpc_energy_repo
Python
MSc Dissertation: AI-Driven Workload and Energy Optimization for Exascale Scientific Computing.
★ 1
TensorTonic-Solutions
Python
Solutions to TensorTonic ML problems.
Open source models with Hugging Face.
Tools & Applications
Tabs-Deejay
JavaScript
Browser media management extension (TabDJ).
nyika-expedition
HTML
Expedition planning and visualization tool.
Research Threads
RL for HPC Scheduling
MSc dissertation at LJMU / Edinburgh EPCC.
Uncertainty Quantification
Conformal prediction for clinical AI under covariate shift.
Gaussian Processes
Healthcare AI in low-resource African contexts.
Compute Governance
Access barriers for African AI innovators.
Work Experience
2025–present
Aga Khan University — Nairobi, Kenya
Manager, Data Infrastructure, AIOps, MLOps & Cloud Engineering
~ Own data and AI platform delivery for AKU Global Data & Innovation, reporting to the Chief Data Officer. Lead distributed engineers across Kenya and Pakistan. Set SLAs for data uptime, quality, and freshness across the AKU Hospital data platform, the NIH-funded Uzima-DS Consortium, and internal research teams.
~ Took Afya Gemma from prototype to production. The MedGemma-based clinical decision support system now operates daily for resident and intern doctors at AKU Hospital (Google GenAI Accelerator Award). Designed the two-stage retrieval architecture (Gemini 2.5 Flash classifier before MedGemma generation) on a ChromaDB vector store.
GCP · Vertex AI · Azure Machine Learning · MedGemma · ChromaDB · Kubernetes · Terraform
2023–2025
Aga Khan University — Nairobi, Kenya
Lead Data Infrastructure Engineer (AIOps & Cloud)
~ Architected and scaled real-time and batch data platforms supporting research, analytics, and clinical operations across Kenya, Pakistan, and external consortium partners. Designed the secure Conversational RAG platform on Azure OpenAI, PgVector, and Azure AI Search with full data sovereignty.
~ Started the early architecture and prototyping of Afya Gemma.
Azure Synapse · Azure OpenAI · Azure AI Search · PgVector · Databricks · MLOps
2022–2023
Aga Khan University — Remote
Senior Data Architect / Engineer
~ Built foundational data pipelines and platform components. Built the university's first enterprise clinical data repository (records 2008–present). Designed multi-country ingestion pipelines including real-time Fitbit streaming for 615 healthcare workers in Kenya.
Kafka · Flink · Spark · Python · Azure Data Factory · Delta Lake · Airflow
2021–2022
Copia Global — Nairobi, Kenya
Data Platform Manager (AWS)
~ Architected AWS-based data platforms, including Lambda pipelines processing 250K+ rows/day and MLOps systems that reduced referral program costs by 60%. Built the data engineering function from the ground up.
AWS Lambda · REST APIs · Streaming Data · SageMaker · Redshift · Glue
2020–2021
Copia Global — Nairobi, Kenya
Senior Data Engineer
~ Owned the design and evolution of AWS-based data platforms supporting analytics, operations, and ML use cases. Delivered production ML systems including recommendation engines.
AWS SageMaker · Streaming Data · S3 · Python · dbt
Oct 2021–
Jun 2022
Jun 2022
Zubale — Mexico City, Mexico (Remote)
Senior Big Data Engineer / Architect
~ Redesigned streaming pipelines and data contracts to reduce cloud costs by ~25%. Built automated ML infrastructure on GCP and delivered architecture, implementation, and DataOps practices.
Kafka · Flink · Spark · PostgreSQL · GCP · BigQuery · Dataflow · Pub/Sub · Terraform
May 2019–
Jan 2020
Jan 2020
Zealtech Data Solutions — Nairobi, Kenya
Business Intelligence & Analytics Consultant
~ Delivered ML models, dashboards, and customer 360 data marts. Directed analytics operations and partnered with architects to define BI strategy.
Apache Airflow · Azure Data Factory · Power BI · Tableau · SQL · Python · scikit-learn
Jan 2018–
Apr 2019
Apr 2019
Cropnuts — Nairobi
Data Analytics and Support Engineer (Digital Ocean)
~ Built ML models that democratized soil analysis across Africa and automated reporting pipelines.
Jan 2017–
Dec 2017
Dec 2017
SkyTOP Technologies — Nairobi
Software Developer
~ Designed custom software solutions to support BI adoption. Developed BI systems for SMEs.
Jan 2016–
Dec 2016
Dec 2016
Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) — Nairobi
Data Systems Analyst (Contract)
~ Supported secure data systems for national exam administration. Reduced processing time by 30%.
Jan 2015–
Dec 2016
Dec 2016
Redbric Consultancy — Nairobi
Assistant Research Officer
~ Research design and data collection across socio-economic development projects for NGOs.
Jan 2014–
Dec 2015
Dec 2015
Ahero Sub County Hospital — Kisumu
Health Information Systems Assistant
~ Managed patient records, extracted key statistics, digitized health records.
Education
2024–2026
Liverpool John Moores University — United Kingdom
MSc, Computing & Information Systems
~ Dissertation: RL and Bayesian Optimization for Workload Scheduling on HPC and Exascale Infrastructure.
2010–2014
University of Kabianga — Kenya
BSc, Applied Statistics with Computing
Certifications
2025
University of Stuttgart — Advanced Parallel Programming with MPI and OpenMP
2025
University of Stuttgart — GPU Programming Using CUDA
2025
Stanford University — Human-Centered Generative AI
Stack
Languages & Frameworks
Python, SQL, FastAPI, React, TypeScript, Bash
AWS Data Services
S3, Redshift, Glue, Athena, Lambda, SageMaker, Kinesis, Step Functions, EMR, CloudFormation, IAM, CloudWatch, RDS, DynamoDB
Azure Data Services
Synapse Analytics, Data Factory, Data Lake Storage, Databricks, Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Search, Event Hubs, Azure Functions, Cosmos DB, Azure Monitor, Key Vault, Azure DevOps
GCP Data Services
BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Cloud Composer, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Cloud Run, Artifact Registry
Data & ML
Kafka, Spark, Flink, Airflow, dbt, Iceberg, Delta Lake, ChromaDB, pgvector, LangChain, Hugging Face, MLflow, Great Expectations
Infrastructure
Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
Databases
PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cosmos DB, Elasticsearch
Contact
Have a role, project, or collaboration in mind? Send a note and it reaches my inbox directly.
Open to
- Data Platform Engineering Manager
- Principal / Staff Data & ML Engineer
- Engineering Manager (Data / ML Platform)
- Head of Data & AI