Curriculum vitae
David Kimani
Full-stack engineer: operational systems, multi-tenant SaaS and production operations
Nairobi, Kenya · EAT (UTC+3) · Remote. Open to relocation; would need visa sponsorship to work on-site outside Kenya.
Summary
Full-stack engineer with seven years building and running production web applications, 27+ of them shipped across property, healthcare, regulated operations and online marketplaces. The work I am best at is operational software that has to stay up: scheduling, audit trails, payment allocation and reconciliation, multi-tenant SaaS, and the deployment and monitoring that keep it running. I take a system from the data model to production and stay responsible for it afterwards. Founder of Kimcard Technologies, a product engineering studio in Nairobi.
Experience
Founder and principal engineer
- Built and run rentiQ, a live multi-tenant property management SaaS for Kenyan landlords. Lease charges become monthly invoices, and each payment is allocated to the oldest unpaid invoice first, under a row lock, into append-only allocation records.
- Designed the money rules so the books survive an audit: corrections are offsetting reversals rather than edits, overpayments are held as tenant credit, and receipts are numbered without gaps per organisation.
- Built the studio operations platform: invoicing in integer minor units with gapless numbering and withholding-tax tracking, recurring SLA billing that is safe to re-run, and monthly SLA reports computed from locked metrics.
- Built an incident pipeline that ingests signed events from uptime and error monitors, de-duplicates them by fingerprint, detects missed heartbeats and routes alerts around quiet hours, with PHP and JavaScript agents that client applications report through.
- Built a client portal with its own sign-in, separate from staff accounts, with every query scoped to the signed-in client by construction and approvals pinned to the exact version a client signed off.
Full-stack engineer, freelance and contract
- Shipped production web applications for businesses in property, healthcare, regulated operations and online marketplaces, owning each from the data model and API through to deployment.
- Replaced paper, spreadsheet and WhatsApp processes with systems of record that hold the audit trail, and integrated the services those businesses ran on: SMS through Africa's Talking, transactional email, and real-time updates over websockets.
- Shipped M-Pesa Daraja payment integrations in production for several clients.
- Ran the operations as well as the code: Docker images, CI/CD pipelines, and hosting on AWS and DigitalOcean.
- Contributed to Vuetify, the Vue component framework most of these applications are built on.
Projects
rentiQ
Multi-tenant property management SaaS for Kenyan landlords and agents. Live, in early access.
The hard part was allocating every payment arrears-first into append-only records, with reversals instead of edits and gapless receipts per organisation.
Kimcard operations platform
The studio's internal CMS, CRM, invoicing system and client portal.
The hard part was billing and SLA reporting that are safe to re-run, and an incident pipeline that turns monitor noise into one ticket per real problem.
Regulatory operations platform
Training, site assessments and shift rostering for a national regulatory authority responsible for site assessments and mandatory workforce certification. Built through Kimcard Technologies and supported under SLA.
The hard part was refusing a training booking whose people are rostered on, or whose instructor or room is taken, when training, site assessments and the roster each hold only part of who is free.
Skills
- Systems
- Multi-tenant SaaS, Payment allocation and reconciliation, M-Pesa Daraja integrations, Ledgers, invoicing and audit trails, Event ingestion, alerting and incident response, REST API design
- Languages and frameworks
- PHP, TypeScript, JavaScript, Laravel, Node.js, Vue 3, Nuxt, Inertia, Vuetify (contributor)
- Data
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB
- Operations
- Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, AWS, DigitalOcean
- Testing
- Pest, PHPUnit, Vitest, Playwright
Languages
English, Swahili, German
Contact
- Site
- davidkimani.dev
- GitHub
- github.com/kimani-dev
- linkedin.com/in/davidkimani
- Location
- Nairobi, Kenya, EAT (UTC+3)
- Work
- Remote. Open to relocation; would need visa sponsorship to work on-site outside Kenya.