CO-FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL ENGINEER
Twelve years moving money and trust through Zambian systems. National tolling, electricity vending, banking middleware, then engineering leadership for a German product company. Now building the thing all of it was practice for.
One question has run through the whole career: how do you move money and trust through Zambian systems reliably?
The answer arrived in pieces. A tolling system taught how a national payment obligation behaves at the roadside. Electricity vending taught what happens when a transaction must complete or a household sits in the dark. A banking service bus taught how institutions that do not trust each other can still settle. Engineering leadership taught that the hardest part of a system is usually the people around it.
What were once separate integration jobs are now layers of a single stack.
2024 to present · Lusaka
Architect and lead engineer of a sovereign economic platform: identity, payments, settlement, tax, commerce and logistics as one system rather than a portfolio of products. It is live and serving tenants.
Three independent estimation methods put roughly 40 person-years of engineering in the codebase, delivered solo in 133 days working with AI tooling and a disciplined process. That figure is published with its caveats rather than as a boast.
My own published grading. Breadth came first and hardening is the current work. Velocity without that disclosure is marketing.
May 2024 to November 2025 · Germany, remote from Lusaka
Where the work stopped being only technical. Product ownership and mentoring are why UnityZM has a delivery process rather than just a codebase.
March 2019 to December 2023 · Lusaka
Five years inside Zambia's actual payment plumbing. This is where the conviction came from that the country does not need another app; it needs the rails underneath to agree with each other.
2013 to 2019 · Lusaka
Identity, money, settlement and tax before anything that demos well. You cannot retrofit correctness into a ledger, and you can always add a screen to a correct one.
New capability rides existing rails. If a feature needs its own data model and its own auth, it is usually the wrong shape.
Not a single client's name appears anywhere in the codebase. The urge to type one is the bug, and the fix is a parameter resolved at runtime.
Every assessment I publish carries what is missing. It costs something in the moment and buys everything afterwards.
Specification, then test-driven development, then review. Every change through a pull request, because the review queue is where AI-assisted velocity usually drowns.
Offline-first is not a feature here. A node at a border post that stops working when connectivity does is not infrastructure.
Diploma in Computer Science, Evelyn Hone College, Lusaka, 2015 to 2018. Everything since has been self-directed: distributed systems, fintech, AI engineering.
Languages: English, Bemba, Nyanja.