Open to Principal / Staff & data-platform leadership roles
- 12yrsProduction data platforms
- 3Clouds — AWS · Azure · GCP
- 2.5M+/dayRows processed daily
- 99.9%+Uptime, critical healthcare systems
Profile
★ Google GenAI Accelerator Award
Aga Khan University
AWS
Azure
GCP
Stanford HAI
LJMU · EPCC
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.
I build the data foundation that makes AI and analytics trustworthy, scalable, and production-ready.
My platform work sits where data engineering meets AI. I have built feature-engineering pipelines that cut model-ready dataset preparation time by 30%, put statistical anomaly detection in front of data quality problems before users found them, and designed the data infrastructure under LLM and automation workloads.
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
Case studies
Selected work
Afya Gemma — clinical decision support in production
Taking a MedGemma-based assistant from prototype to daily use by doctors at Aga Khan University Hospital — and earning the Google GenAI Accelerator Award along the way.
Read the case study →
A multi-country research & clinical data platform
The lakehouse, streaming, and governance foundation behind AKU's research and hospital analytics across Kenya and Pakistan — 99.9%+ uptime with p99 freshness SLOs.
Read the case study →
2.5M rows a day on AWS at Copia
Building the data platform for e-commerce across Kenya and Uganda: multi-AZ Postgres replication, 15-minute freshness SLOs, and MLOps that cut costs 60%.
Read the case study →
Writing
Latest writings
Read more →Writing
Field notes on data platforms, streaming, and applied AI in production.
Posts published on this site live under /blog/; earlier pieces link out to LinkedIn.
Projects
Case studies of production systems I have led, and a selection of open-source work across data infrastructure, healthcare AI, MLOps, and applied AI. The full repository list lives on GitHub.
Case studies
Afya Gemma — clinical decision support in production
MedGemma + Gemini two-stage retrieval on ChromaDB, grounded in Kenyan Ministry of Health guidelines. Google GenAI Accelerator Award.
Multi-country research & clinical data platform
Azure lakehouse with Delta/Iceberg, real-time wearable streaming, disaster recovery, and enterprise RAG — 99.9%+ uptime.
Commercial data platform on AWS (Copia)
2.5M+ rows/day through CDC pipelines, multi-AZ Postgres replication with <10s failover, and a recommendation engine that cut the retargeting programme’s cost by 60%.
Healthcare AI
Afya-Sahihi
Python
MedGemma-based clinical decision support system for Kenyan healthcare professionals (Google GenAI Accelerator Award).
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.
Legacy SQL to Snowflake-style warehouse migration: schema, ETL, query conversion, and validation.
Serverless data processing platform with auto-scaling analytics.
ML, AI Agents & LLM Infrastructure
Multimodal AI agent platform with tool-use capabilities.
AI coding assistant designed for navigating and working with large repositories.
LLM analytics and telemetry platform for monitoring and observability.
MLOps & Model Serving
Distributed feature store and model serving platform.
Distributed training data checkpointing and runtime.
Research & HPC
dissertation_hpc_energy_repo
Python
MSc Dissertation: AI-Driven Workload and Energy Optimization for Exascale Scientific Computing.
★ 1
Tools & Products
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 with batch pipelines processing 2.5M+ rows/day for e-commerce across Kenya and Uganda, including a SageMaker recommendation engine whose targeted discounts cut the retargeting programme’s cost 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
Prefer a channel? All my links live in the footer below.