Reuben Balozi Software Engineer · Nairobi

I lead the engineering teams at Dadanada. I remain hands-on across architecture, implementation, delivery and incident response for platform, web and mobile products. Together, those systems support account, payment and payout services across more than 20 countries.

I started in mobility with Daride, working across its mobile, routing, payments and identity platforms while building backend features with the wider team. Its Flexi Bid flow gave riders and drivers an alternative to a fixed fare by allowing them to bid on the price, becoming one of the product’s defining differentiators.

I later moved into payments and now lead frontend and backend delivery for Dapay and Dabusiness. Dapay gives consumers one place to hold and exchange currencies, send money, pay bills and buy everyday services. Dabusiness gives agents and sales agents the tools to process those transactions for customers, manage service wallets and commissions, onboard agents and oversee their networks. Together, the products support local, regional and international transfers through bank accounts, mobile money, cash pickup and digital wallets, alongside electricity, airtime, data, SMS and voice.

In Goma, Dapay became an authorised channel for purchasing prepaid electricity from SOCODEE through USSD and mobile. The agent network extends those services into rural communities across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Uganda and Cameroon, allowing people to send and receive remittances, pay bills and buy electricity closer to home.

Dadanada’s role as a payout partner for NALA, LemFi and other international remittance companies across East and Central Africa, including CEMAC markets, brought sustained growth and sharp bursts in transaction traffic. The existing flows could leave transactions pending or failed under load, while delayed or inconsistent provider statuses made recovery and reconciliation harder. I led the platform response: defining the target architecture, sequencing the migration and coordinating changes across the transaction engine, partner integrations and payout flows. I remained hands-on with the transaction lifecycle, including quotes, FX, routing, fees and commissions, settlement, reconciliation, refunds and state management. We optimised critical queries, introduced event-driven processing and strengthened recovery, monitoring and alerting. The result was lower database load and reconciliation time, with better latency, success rates and availability and fewer incidents.

Scale also required a more exact financial model. Working as a team, I helped lead the design and delivery of complete accounting and ERP capabilities spanning the general ledger, chart of accounts, wallets and sub-accounts, journals, fees, commissions, settlements, reconciliations, revenue and expenses. This gave finance a traceable view of each movement of money, who it belonged to, what it was for, where it should settle and what the business earned or spent, dynamically across products. I also built analytics services and dashboards for finance, transaction operations, monitoring and alerts, and introduced AI-assisted fraud detection, incident intelligence, data analysis, visualisation and generative interfaces while contributing to identity, KYC, AML, sanctions, PCI DSS and audit controls.

Alongside the platform work, I worked with the frontend team to revamp Daremit’s mobile and web applications, simplifying the experience to support retention as customers in Europe and Canada sent money to more than 40 African countries.

I joined Sematext to help build its Infrastructure Monitoring module, using React and TypeScript to turn telemetry from 100+ integrations into reusable dashboards, visualisations and drilldowns. I also shipped AI-assisted incident intelligence that reduced manual triage effort by 30%.

I later worked across the frontend, backend services and monitoring agents behind AI Agent Watch. The product helps organisations discover AI agents across bare-metal servers, VMs, cloud instances, Kubernetes and containers, understand their activity and model usage, detect potential PII exposure and surface risky behaviour through reports and alerts—all without requiring changes to their applications.

I joined Pesaflow in 2024 as a Senior Software Engineer I and progressed to Senior Software Engineer III in 2025, growing from an individual contributor to leading teams totalling 80 engineers. I worked across the payments teams behind eCitizen, KRA’s tax platforms, South Sudan’s eTax, Khusa Pay and Pesaflow, with one goal across every product: make public-service payments as easy and dependable as possible.

On eCitizen, I built the product end to end across web and mobile, together with Android, iOS and web SDKs that let other services integrate eCitizen payments. I built digital-identity journeys that match facial or fingerprint scans against national records, removing the need for email-and-password login; integrated SSO that cut integration time by 50%; and delivered a wallet spanning bank accounts, mobile money and cards. The platform now serves millions of users across more than 20,000 government services and collects approximately US$10 million a day.

That work expanded into KRA, where I built the new web and backend platform for tax filing, returns and payments, then delivered eTIMS end to end across mobile, web, desktop and backend systems, including offline workflows and device integrations. eTIMS is now required for businesses nationwide and its invoice data supports return validation. I also built Shuru, KRA’s WhatsApp assistant for tax filing, payments and eTIMS services; KWS’s eCitizen module for park-entry collections, payouts and tracking; and NTSA’s automated-fines integration, turning computer-vision detections such as speeding and seat-belt violations into SMS and email notices with payment links.

For South Sudan, I built mobile applications for eTax’s Customs, Revenue, Payroll and ETR services and contributed to their backends. I helped digitise sales-tax collection and roll out ETR and POS devices to businesses, including card payments, offline operation and OTA updates. I also worked on the customs application and backend for import and export declarations, applications and goods payments. These systems became critical infrastructure for collecting and tracking government revenue.

For Malawi, I built the Khusa Pay mobile app, part of Pesaflow’s settlement platform, for merchants to collect and disburse funds across bank accounts, mobile money and cards, pay for government services, invoices and payroll, and track settlements without managing separate float accounts. Across the wider portfolio, I built card integrations under PCI DSS requirements and shipped production AI-native features for the payments SDK and fraud analysis.

I joined Vanoma in 2023 as part of a ten-person engineering team, working alongside senior engineers from Amazon and other global technology companies. It was a young startup with few boundaries, so I worked hands-on across the entire product, from architecture and microservices to mobile, web, backend, data and infrastructure.

We built Vanoma as an AI-first beauty-commerce platform centred on influencers. Beauty businesses could launch and run a complete online store from the web or mobile app, managing their catalogue, storefront, checkout, payments, inventory, orders and analytics. Influencers could curate storefronts, recommend products, run campaigns and earn from the sales they generated. We adopted OpenAI GPT-3.5 before generative AI became mainstream, using it to create interfaces whose formatting and layouts adapted to each business’s taste and to help businesses and influencers write copy for their storefronts and campaigns.

The platform was built on a catalogue of more than 10,000 beauty products with detailed attributes, covering brands and retailers such as Maybelline, La Roche-Posay, L’Oréal Paris, Lintons and many others. I worked across the pipelines that scraped, cleaned and normalised records, resolved duplicates and variants, organised the taxonomy, handled incomplete data, processed images and pricing, and kept the catalogue current. That dataset powered Vanoma and was also commercialised as an API for e-commerce platforms, beauty brands and AI companies.

Working with that team changed how I approached engineering. I learned to reason at the architecture level, think carefully about service boundaries and failure modes, and take ownership of decisions before writing code. It taught me to slow down at the right moment and design systems that could hold up as the startup moved faster.

I joined USAID HealthIT in 2022 as a Software Engineer on a 20-person team, working across two national systems at the same time: the Kenya Master Health Facility List (KMHFL) and the Child Protection Information Management System (CPIMS). I worked end to end across both products and led the CPIMS implementation across mobile, web and backend.

For KMHFL, I worked across the public and administrative applications, APIs and data flows behind Kenya’s authoritative registry of more than 14,000 health facilities across all 47 counties and over 9,000 community units. I built workflows for inspecting, registering, validating, approving and publishing facilities; managed the unique codes and records describing their location, ownership, type, status and services; and built the search, filters, maps and nearby-facility tools people use to find care.

The hard part was not placing dots on a map, but keeping a national source of truth dependable. I worked through duplicate records, incorrect coordinates, changing administrative boundaries, data migrations and unreliable connections; improved search performance, data quality and approval flows; and connected KMHFL with KHIS/DHIS2, regulatory, supply and clinical systems so each could refer to the same facility identity.

For CPIMS, I led implementation end to end across the Flutter mobile app, web application and Django backend. The system follows vulnerable children from registration through assessment, case planning, service delivery, referrals, institutional or alternative care and eventual exit, while giving programme teams GIS views, reports and data-quality tools. I built offline synchronisation so caseworkers could continue working in communities without dependable internet and synchronise their records after reconnecting.

That work helped turn CPIMS into a field tool used across all 47 counties, 290 subcounty offices and 30 statutory institutions. It gave caseworkers a consistent view of each case, gave programme teams faster and cleaner national reporting, and supported services for more than 23,000 orphaned and vulnerable children.

Joined straight out of college as Mugogo’s youngest full-time engineer and stayed two years, building products across creator commerce, education and travel.

I built SchoolTry, bringing student records, attendance, grading, fees and communication into one place for primary and secondary schools in Kenya and Nigeria. In 2022, it rolled out to all 45 Nigerian Command Schools; it has since grown to more than 1,500 schools and 1.5 million users worldwide.

BYOB.ai was where creators met brands and carried a deal from the first brief to payout. I built it across mobile, web and backend, including campaign matching, live collaboration and escrow-backed payments.

Travely was the final chapter. It began as a marketplace for stays and experiences, then grew into a way for influencers and travel companies to bundle hotels and activities into complete itineraries and sell the whole trip. I worked across discovery, booking, payments and payouts as it passed 100,000 users and was later acquired.