Joseph Gitonga

Independent consulting practice. I design and build AI products and production software for fintech and growth-stage teams. End-to-end engagement, architecture through launch. Went full-time on the practice in April 2026.

• /Partner with founder-led and growth-stage teams to ship the actual software. Discovery, architecture, hands-on engineering, rollout.
• /Focus areas: AI products (assistants, copilots, search, decision tools), fintech systems (payments, fraud, settlement, money movement), custom backends and customer-facing apps, plus senior engineering leadership for teams without an internal lead.
• /Clients engage me directly as an independent contractor, or through Noria Technologies LTD when their procurement process prefers an entity. Both are standard.
• /Past FTE roles (Stax Payments, Turing) were held in parallel with the practice. Now operating exclusively from Noria.

Built custom reinforcement learning training environments for enterprise clients. Combined FastAPI backends with React dashboards to speed up RL model development.

• /Architected RESTful API endpoints for gym orchestration: environment init, step execution, state snapshots, reward tracking. Handled 10K+ requests per minute across distributed training clusters.
• /Developed MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool integrations that let LLM agents interact with RL environments programmatically. Opened up agentic training workflows for clients.
• /Built React dashboards that surfaced real-time training metrics, episode replays, and hyperparameter tuning controls. Cut debugging cycles by 40%.
• /Engineered FastAPI services with async workers and connection pooling. Sub-10ms latency on gym step operations at 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. Shaved 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 while scaling SaaS for construction project operations, payments, and supplier collaboration. Cloud infrastructure, security, business email, developer tooling.

• /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. 99.99% uptime across environments.
• /Directed a cross-functional engineering team delivering scalable services across 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 optimised Postgres workloads to sustain 20M+ transactions per month at 99.999% availability.
• /Embedded ML-driven fraud heuristics and chargeback automation. Cut 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.

• /Modelled 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. Unlocked near real-time quality assurance dashboards.
• /Built a React + Mapbox operations console for agronomists, surfacing geospatial insights and exception alerts.

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

• /Directed a squad of developers to ship client integrations on schedule and within budget.
• /Designed and delivered a high-availability bulk SMS API supporting 20,000+ concurrent users and 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.

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

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

Shipped internal tooling and analytics platforms for 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. Productivity lifted around 20%.

BSc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering

University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya, 2014 - 2019

Five years inside labs and control rooms that demanded systems thinking, fault-tolerant design, and optionality across hardware and software. That discipline still shows up in every production launch.

Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education

Siakago Boys' High School, Mbeere, Kenya, 2009 - 2012

Balanced maths mastery with national science congress wins to graduate with an A. Earned admission to the prestigious University of Nairobi Dental School. Chose engineering instead, for the bigger systems puzzles.