Derick Mghanga

Software engineer with a track record of architecting and shipping scalable web applications and software end-to-end. Thrives in fast-paced, agile environments, translating complex requirements into clean, maintainable systems. Passionate about software architecture, performance, and building products that solve real-world problems.

Software Developer | Kenyan Classified Ads & Marketplace at FREE MARKET KENYA (freemarket.co.ke) (Present)

• Built a search & ranking engine using cursor-paginated listing API with a relevance scoring system, ensuring featured sellers get visibility while keeping results relevant, the core monetization-vs-relevance balance every classifieds platform has to solve.
• Implemented caching with cache stampede prevention (distributed locking) so high-traffic category pages don't hammer the database when cache expires simultaneously for many users, essential for a marketplace with bursty traffic.
• Self-hosted and operated production infrastructure on Linux VPS using Docker and Kubernetes, handling deployment, scaling, and service orchestration without reliance on managed cloud platforms.
• Built CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions (including automated rollout failure detection), managed PostgreSQL connection pooling via PgBouncer, and automated off-site database backups to S3/R2 for disaster recovery.
• Hardened infrastructure security through SSH key-only auth, fail2ban, UFW firewall rules, Linux user isolation, and containerized workload separation, significantly reducing the attack surface across multi-service deployments.
• Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub actions, AWS, S3, Cloudflare, Next.js, DRF, Redis, PgBouncer, fail2ban, UFW, Linux

Software Developer at ILO VALUE (2024-10 – 2025-08)

• Designed and built interactive, data-heavy dashboards and reporting tools (real-time filters), reducing report generation time by 70% and supporting datasets of 100,000+ records with sub-second load times via caching and virtualization.
• Created intuitive, accessible interfaces for handling sensitive corporate data, implementing security best practices (RBAC, encryption, audit logging) that reduced compliance/audit findings by 25% and cut onboarding time for new users by 30%.
• Re-architected backend services to optimize performance under heavy, multi-tenant loads, implementing caching, query optimization, and connection pooling, which reduced average API response time by 45% (from ~800ms to ~440ms), cutting database load by 50% and enabling the platform to handle 2x traffic growth without additional infrastructure cost.
• PHP, Laravel, Grafana, Slack, Redis, PgBouncer, Throttling, Tanstack

Full Stack Software Development – IBM SKILLS NETWORK (2024-01 – 2024-10)

Bachelor of Science in Electronics – SOUTH EASTERN KENYA UNIVERSITY (2017-08 – 2022-10)