Joseph Gitonga

Build custom reinforcement learning training environments for enterprise clients, combining FastAPI backends with React frontiers to accelerate RL model development cycles.

• Architected RESTful API endpoints for gym orchestration - environment initialization, step execution, state snapshots, and reward tracking - handling 10K+ requests/min across distributed training clusters.
• Developed MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool integrations enabling LLM agents to interact with RL environments programmatically, opening up agentic training workflows for clients.
• Built React dashboards that surface real-time training metrics, episode replays, and hyperparameter tuning controls, cutting debugging cycles by 40%.
• Engineered FastAPI services with async workers and connection pooling, achieving sub-10ms latency on gym step operations while maintaining 99.9% uptime.

Engineer within an applied research pod translating LLM breakthroughs into production-grade developer tooling.

• Designed inference orchestration services that auto-select optimal LLM providers, shaving 28% off infrastructure spend while keeping sub-second latency guarantees.
• Implemented retrieval evaluation harnesses and prompt analytics that improved answer correctness by 18% across client deployments.
• Partnered with MLOps and compliance teams to deliver SOC2-ready audit trails, rate limiting, and encrypted artefact storage for enterprise integrations.

Own the entire technology stack - from cloud infrastructure and security to business email suites and developer tooling - while scaling SaaS for construction project operations, payments, and supplier collaboration.

• Spearheaded development of a SaaS construction project management and payments platform that unifies contractor and supplier workflows.
• Led architecture, development, and production rollout end-to-end, maintaining 99.99% uptime across environments.
• Directed a cross-functional engineering team delivering scalable services spanning project tracking, budgeting, and secure payments.
• Scaled the platform to support 100+ active projects while processing over KES 40M in payments to date.

Owned mission-critical payment and risk services across a high-throughput fintech platform.

• Refactored Node.js settlement services and optimized Postgres workloads to sustain 20M+ transactions/month with five-nines availability.
• Embedded ML-driven fraud heuristics and chargeback automation, cutting fraudulent transactions by 70% and manual review overhead by 55%.
• Championed domain-driven design practices and incident retrospectives that reduced Sev-1 occurrences by 40% year-over-year.

Brought blockchain-backed produce traceability from pilot to field-ready deployment for 600+ smallholder farmers.

• Modeled supply-chain data flows and implemented API gateways that scaled peak harvest traffic by 50% without downtime.
• Automated inventory reconciliation using sensor data and smart contracts, unlocking near real-time quality assurance dashboards.
• Enabled agronomists with a React + Mapbox operations console surfacing geospatial insights and exception alerts.

Led platform hardening for bulk SMS and feedback systems across telecom clients while guiding a hybrid Nairobi engineering team.

• Directed a squad of developers to ship client integrations on schedule and within budget expectations.
• Designed and delivered a high-availability bulk SMS API supporting 20,000+ concurrent users and more than 3M messages monthly.
• Implemented automated testing and CI/CD pipelines that pushed coverage to 90% and shrank deployment windows from days to hours.
• Mentored junior engineers through code reviews to elevate code quality and maintain best practices.

Delivered secure wallet and payment rails for pan-African e-commerce partners.

• Built tokenization and settlement APIs with layered security controls, shrinking time-to-market for new merchants by 60%.
• Introduced contract testing and observability pipelines that cut incident detection time from hours to minutes.
• Collaborated with product and legal teams on KYC/AML flows ready for multiple regulatory jurisdictions.

Shipped internal tooling and analytics platforms spanning finance, retail, and logistics clients.

• Delivered CI/CD automation that reduced average deployment times from two days to under two hours.
• Developed pluggable microservices in Laravel and Node.js to accelerate feature delivery across multiple client portfolios.
• Mentored junior engineers on test strategy and architecture fundamentals, resulting in a 20% productivity lift.