Peter Bikundo · Staff Software Engineer · Nairobi
I make hard systems simpler, and the teams around them faster.
I'm a staff engineer with twelve years across fintech, payroll, betting, mobile learning, ticketing and airline retail. The domain keeps changing. The job is still to understand how everything fits together and help the team build the right thing.
Hello, I'm Peter Bikundo
I'm a staff software engineer, and I take on consulting work too. I've kept payroll APIs at 99.99% uptime, led a 15-engineer team delivering learning content to millions of people over SMS and USSD, and rebuilt AirMall, the inflight shop used by airlines such as airBaltic. Now I help teams audit legacy codebases, design payment systems and ship full-stack Laravel and Vue products with AI built in.
Peter Bikundo
Staff Software Engineer 12 Years shipping
Years shipping
production software
Most of my best work is hard to see: a migration nobody noticed, or a design that's still easy to change five years later.- Peter Bikundo, bikundo.dev
Services
How I can help
Hands-on engineering and technical leadership for companies whose systems move money, pay people or serve millions. Bring me in for a one-week audit, a fixed-scope project or ongoing leadership on retainer.
1-week audit
AUDIT & SCALE RESCUE
Your product is growing and the system is starting to buckle: slow pages, timeouts, jobs that never finish. I find out why and give you a plan your team can act on.
- Codebase, database and infrastructure review
- Bottlenecks ranked by impact and effort
- Security gaps in APIs that handle money or personal data
- Cloud cost-reduction plan and a 3-month scaling roadmap
ProofTook Workpay's payroll computation and exports from over 3 hours to under 2 minutes.
Fixed-scope project
PAYMENTS, WALLETS & LEDGERS
Money code has no room for "mostly works". I design payment flows and ledgers that reconcile to the cent, survive gateway timeouts and hold up in an audit.
- M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, Stripe, PayPal and Payaza integrations
- Double-entry ledgers and automated reconciliation
- Idempotent retries, so nobody is charged twice
- Payroll, payouts and multi-market billing
ProofBuilt multi-market ticketing checkout at MOOKH and payroll APIs at Workpay running at 99.99% uptime.
Fixed-scope project
USSD, SMS & MOBILE REACH
Many of your customers don't have data or a smartphone. USSD and SMS reach them on any phone, as long as sessions are fast and the carrier integrations hold.
- USSD menus and session handling
- SMS gateways, alerts and two-way messaging
- Direct integrations with Safaricom, MTN and Tigo
- Flutter and React Native apps for users who do have smartphones
ProofDelivered learning content to millions of users across Africa over USSD and SMS at Eneza.
Monthly retainer
FRACTIONAL CTO & ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP
You need senior technical judgment, but not necessarily a full-time hire yet. I step in as your fractional CTO or engineering lead for as long as you need.
- Architecture decisions and a technical roadmap
- Hiring, team structure and onboarding
- Agile delivery that ships on schedule
- Code reviews, mentoring and quality standards
ProofLed a 15-engineer team at Eneza, and cut incident resolution time by 35% at Workpay.
Fixed-scope project
PLATFORM MODERNIZATION & DEVOPS
Legacy systems rarely need a risky rewrite. I modernize them piece by piece while the business keeps running, and automate how code gets to production.
- Monolith to services, migrated incrementally
- CI/CD with GitLab CI, GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy
- Docker and AWS infrastructure that scales with traffic
- Automated tests and static analysis as release gates
ProofMoved Eneza from a monolith to Node.js, Elixir and Python services, and raised Workpay's deployment efficiency by 40%.
Fixed-scope project
PRODUCT BUILDS, IDEA TO LAUNCH
I design, build and launch complete products: the backend, the web app, the mobile app and everything that connects them.
- Web and mobile apps with Vue 3, Flutter and React Native
- Real-time systems: WebSockets, IoT and OCPP
- Maps and GIS for land, logistics and fleets
- AI features in production: parsing, OCR and automated workflows
ProofRebuilt AirMall, InterLnkd's inflight shopping platform used by airlines such as airBaltic, and built Zawadi and JengaCV.
Skills
Skills & expertise
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS
PHP / LARAVEL
ELIXIR / PHOENIX
ADVANCED
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS GO (GOLANG)
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS
SYMFONY
ADVANCED
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS JAVASCRIPT / TS
ADVANCED
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS REACT NATIVE
INTERMEDIATE
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS FLUTTER / DART
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKS
VUE 3 / INERTIA.JS
EXPERT
LANGUAGES & FRAMEWORKSDATABASES & CACHING
MYSQL
EXPERT
DATABASES & CACHING POSTGRESQL
EXPERT
DATABASES & CACHING REDIS
ADVANCED
DATABASES & CACHING MONGODB
DATABASES & CACHING
MESSAGING & SEARCH
RABBITMQ
MESSAGING & SEARCH
APACHE KAFKA
MESSAGING & SEARCH
ELASTICSEARCH
MESSAGING & SEARCH
MEILISEARCH
MESSAGING & SEARCH
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
DOCKER
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
GITLAB CI / GITHUB ACTIONS
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
AWS / GCP
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
NGINX
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
LINUX (UBUNTU)
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
LARAVEL CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
NIGHTWATCH MONITORING
INFRASTRUCTURE & DEVOPS
TESTING & QUALITY
PEST / PHPUNIT
TESTING & QUALITY
PHPSTAN / PINT
TESTING & QUALITY
NIGHTWATCH.JS
TESTING & QUALITY
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
MULTI-TENANT SAAS
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
FINTECH & DOUBLE-ENTRY ACCOUNTING
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
AI PRODUCT INTEGRATION
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
REST APIS & WEBHOOKS
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
BACKGROUND JOBS & QUEUES
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
USSD & SMS PLATFORMS
DOMAINS & PRACTICES
Projects
Featured projects
Client work and products I designed, built and launched, from airline retail and loyalty to EV charging.
Experience
Professional experience
-
Staff Backend Engineer
- Cut payroll computation and export times from over 3 hours to under 2 minutes by rebuilding the PHP 8 processing pipeline, including its record-matching and deduplication logic.
- Ran the payroll REST APIs behind accounting and HR integrations at 99.99% uptime.
- Rebuilt the GitLab CI/CD pipeline, raising deployment efficiency by 40% and reducing downtime during releases.
- Raised the code-quality bar across Laravel codebases by introducing Pest, Pint and PHPStan as standard tooling.
- Mentored junior engineers and wrote the team's troubleshooting guides, cutting incident resolution time by 35% and improving code consistency by 30%.
-
Consulting Architect
- Led the architecture for the greenfield rebuild of MotiVatedData™, InterLnkd's proprietary engine that matches travel bookings and live travel data to ancillary offers across retail, experiences, dining, events and ground transport.
- Rebuilt AirMall, InterLnkd's inflight shopping platform, and integrated it with MotiVatedData™ so passengers see offers curated to their trip.
- Onboarded airline customers such as airBaltic, integrating AirMall with their onboard connectivity portals.
- Designed AirMall for reliability and scale as it expanded to more airlines and markets.
-
Engineering Manager
- Led a team of 15 engineers building SMS, USSD and web learning platforms on AWS and Laravel, reaching millions of learners through regional telecom partnerships.
- Planned and led the move from a legacy monolith to Node.js, Elixir and Python microservices, using a strangler-fig approach to improve scalability and isolate failures.
- Automated releases with GitHub Actions and AWS CodeDeploy, which cut deployment errors and let the team ship more often.
- Introduced Agile delivery across engineering, data and product, so core platform features shipped on schedule.
-
Senior Software Engineer
- Designed the Laravel, PHP and MySQL backend that delivered offline learning content over USSD to millions of users across Africa.
- Led integrations with Safaricom, MTN and Tigo, keeping mobile learning services reliable across each carrier's network.
- Rebuilt USSD session routing and menu state machines in Elixir/BEAM, bringing gateway response times down from 400ms to under 15ms.
- Connected the Facebook Graph and Wikipedia APIs to automate real-time content delivery and increase learner engagement.
-
Software Engineer | Technical Lead
- Designed the Laravel backend and MySQL schemas for event ticketing and payments across several markets, with Redis caching to keep search and checkout fast at peak demand.
- Integrated Stripe, PayPal, M-Pesa and MTN MoMo so buyers in each market could pay with familiar local methods, including cross-border purchases.
- Ran Agile sprints and kept developers, designers and stakeholders aligned, shortening the path from idea to shipped feature.
-
Software Engineer
- Built and launched the PHP and AWS mobile learning platform that opened Eneza's content to a much wider audience.
- Built USSD learning flows so students in low-connectivity areas could reach course material from any phone.
- Integrated the Wikipedia and Facebook Graph APIs for profile enrichment, automated content sourcing and social sign-in.
- Provisioned and tuned the AWS infrastructure to handle high-concurrency traffic and keep the platform available.
-
Software Engineer
- Built real-time API integrations and transactional webhooks that streamed location data between services with minimal latency.
- Wrote data pipelines that turned geolocated logs into accurate, real-time fleet tracking and maps.
- Built webhook-triggered billing calculations that removed billing discrepancies and automated invoicing.
-
Software Engineer
- Co-developed core backend logic and API endpoints in PHP and MySQL for user profiles, geolocation data and payments, integrating several external services.