Dickens (Juma)

AI Product Engineer with 6+ years turning ambiguous ideas into working, production-grade software across fintech, insurtech, AI, and SaaS. Builds fast with AI coding agents and modern LLM tooling (LangChain, OpenAI, RAG pipelines), then applies strong backend and distributed-systems judgment (TypeScript, Node.js, Java, Kafka, AWS) to harden what works into scale-ready systems. Shipped production AI features improving operational accuracy by 40%, payment infrastructure processing 10,000+ monthly transactions, and a multi-tenant SaaS product serving 150+ businesses as founder.

AI Product Engineer (Senior Backend) - Residia AI - US PropTech / AI Startup

(2025-11)

• Designed and shipped AI-native product features – production LLM + RAG services – from prototype to live use in leasing and tenant operations across US real estate environments.
• Rapidly prototyped retrieval and reasoning workflows, validated them against real usage, then hardened the strongest into reusable backend services, cutting inference latency by 30% and improving issue resolution time by 50%.
• Iterated on retrieval pipeline design and lightweight evals, improving workflow accuracy by 40% and reducing hallucinations by 30%.

Software Engineer (Senior Backend) - Nathan Digital - ERP SaaS (UAE/Kenya)

(2024-11 - 2025-10)

• Led migration to Kafka-based event-driven services, improving deployment independence and sprint predictability to >90% acceptance rate.
• Took payroll and ERP concepts from early prototype to modular production services, automating 80% of payroll workflows and reducing infra costs by 25%.
• Deployed cloud-native services with Kubernetes and Terraform achieving 99.9% uptime.
• Mentored junior engineers on engineering standards and fast, disciplined iteration.

Software Engineer - Old Mutual South Africa - FinTech / Insurance (Remote)

(2024-02 - 2024-06)

• Built backend services powering cross-border insurance products across Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria.
• Improved average API latency by 20% through Redis caching and backend optimization.
• Implemented OAuth2 and SAML authentication aligned with PCI and GDPR requirements.

Lead Backend Engineer - WayaMoney - Fintech (Remote, Ghana)

(2023-01 - 2024-02)

• Architected high-availability payment and wallet infrastructure processing 10,000+ monthly transactions.
• Prototyped async, event-driven transaction workflows and idempotent handlers, then scaled the design into production, cutting processing time by 30%.
• Deployed AWS Lambda notification and settlement pipelines; improved reliability under traffic spikes.
• Automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Docker, and Terraform – cut deployment time by 60%.

Backend Developer - Lami Insurance - Insurtech (Kenya)

(2021-11 - 2023-06)

• Built onboarding and policy management APIs cutting manual processing from 3 days to 8 hours (-70% ops workload).
• Built Kafka-based claims processing pipeline; throughput up 35% with automated error retries.
• Integrated M-Pesa, Flutterwave, and Stripe; raised payment success rates by 25%.

Lead Software Developer - Bluewave Insurance - Microinsurance (Kenya)

(2020-10 - 2021-10)

• Led development of a microinsurance USSD platform serving 50,000+ users across Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi.
• Partnered with One Acre Fund to launch farmer insurance products in Malawi with real-time reporting.
• Mentored backend engineers; reduced onboarding time by 40%.

BSc - Software Engineering - The Co-operative University of Kenya (2022 - 2026)

Remote Full-Stack Software Development - Software Development - Microverse (2020 - 2021)