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Kenneth Onah

@kennethonah

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I am a high-impact Backend Engineer who specializes in turning architectural bottlenecks into revenue drivers.

South Africa

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What I'm looking for

I’m motivated by solving real business problems within fast-moving, cross-functional teams. I perform best in collaborative environments that value ownership, experimentation, and continuous improvement, and where teams are empowered to move quickly and deliver meaningful impact.

I am a Backend Engineer who views code not just as a set of instructions, but as a lever for business growth and operational efficiency. Over the course of my career, I’ve moved away from just "building features" toward architecting high-stakes systems that solve expensive problems.

My Career Journey

My expertise lies in navigating the complexities of distributed systems and cloud-native architecture. I have a proven track record of taking monolithic, legacy environments—the kind that keep CTOs up at night—and modernizing them into sleek, scalable microservices using C#, PHP8, and Java.

I thrive in "mission-critical" environments. Whether it’s managing backend services across three global regions to support rapid subscriber growth or orchestrating containers with Kubernetes and Docker, I focus on building systems that are both fault-tolerant and highly performant.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Engr. Lead/Senior Software Engineer

Current

Nano Tech Solutions

Jul 2025 - Feb 2026 (7 months)

Optimized LLM reliability by 42% through the development of a custom RAG-based Agentic AI backend. By benchmarking performance across precision and faithfulness metrics, I transformed a prototype-level AI into a production-grade analytical tool, significantly reducing hallucination rates and improving data-driven decision-making.

Python Java Agentic AI RAG Architecture Leadership Communication Vector Databases PostgreSQL OpenAI API LangGraph Langsmith Langfuse

Development Lead

Cartrack

Feb 2022 - Jul 2025 (3 years 5 months)

=> Slashed operational expenses by $240,000 annually by architecting a real-time messaging system with PHP & RabbitMQ; replaced third-party SMS with asynchronous architecture.
=> Architected and managed distributed Java services across 3 regions, ensuring the backend infrastructure remained resilient under heavy load. I provided the technical foundation that supported +16.6% subscriber growth.

C# .NET ASP.NET PHP PostgreSQL RabbitMQ Minio REST APIs Docker Kubernetes Microservices Architecture System Design Leadership Technical Documentation Communication TDD

Senior Backend Developer

Cartrack

Aug 2021 - Jan 2022 (5 months)

Modernized legacy backend infrastructure by containerizing PHP8 into microservices with Docker and orchestrating them via Kubernetes. By integrating RabbitMQ and Redis, I eliminated processing bottlenecks, while Grafana/Kibana dashboards provided real-time insights which improved system reliability by 90% and reduced deployment times by 88% through automated GitLab CI/CD pipelines.

Java Kotlin C#Microservices Gitlab Python APIs Android SQL Databases PostgreSQL RabbitMQ System Design

Backend Developer

Vaimo e-Commerce Services

Feb 2018 - Jul 2021 (3 years 5 months)

=> Transformed catalog management workflows by replacing a legacy 8-hour bottleneck with a high-performance RabbitMQ integration. By reducing import times by 75%, I enabled the merchandising team to reflect ERP changes on the live site 4x faster, directly improving time-to-market
=> Managed mission-critical backend systems on GCP, with auto-scaling and multi-availability zone (Multi-AZ) strategies

PHP Magneto MySQL Google Cloud New Relic Jenkins CI Rancher GraphQL Vue.Js SQL RabbitMQ

Full Stack Developer

Netcraft DevOps (Pty) Ltd

Dec 2013 - Dec 2017 (4 years)

Key highlight of job at the agency:
=> Designed, and implemented a dozen payment plugins and SDK for PayU Financial Services. Over R3 million in payment transactions was processed by Merchants in the first year of Shopify plugin release.
=> Oversee all phases of the development of Supplizor (Pty) Ltd PHP e-commerce application system, from design, development and deployment