Senior Software Engineer

Victor Turuthi

Ruby on Rails & Fintech

Senior Rails engineer with 6+ years building production fintech systems. I've spent my career in payments — designing payment integrations, building reliable backend infrastructure, and owning systems end-to-end from architecture through to production support. I care about code quality, long-term maintainability, and raising the level of the teams I work in.

Get in touch LinkedIn GitHub

Nairobi, Kenya

Ruby on Rails
PostgreSQL
Redis
AWS
Hotwire
REST APIs
Docker
Python
LLM Integration
CI/CD
Serverless
Terraform

Experience

Finplus Group Limited

Software Engineer

Jan 2021 – Present
  • Built and maintained complex Rails applications in a fintech SaaS environment, serving 1,000–10,000 active users across multiple SACCO institutions — owning features from design through to production support
  • Architected a payment broker service consolidating multiple third-party payment provider integrations into a single reliable backend layer — reduced server costs by over 50% and significantly improved uptime
  • Optimised database performance using PostgreSQL and Redis (ElastiCache), eliminating N+1 queries and reducing latency across high-traffic payment endpoints
  • Migrated background job processing to a serverless architecture (AWS Lambda, SQS), cutting processing time by over 60% and infrastructure costs by 30%
  • Upgraded legacy Rails applications through multiple major versions, managing breaking changes and reducing accumulated technical debt
  • Established CI/CD pipelines with automated linting and security scanning (Brakeman)
  • Mentored junior engineers and contributed to architectural decisions and technology proposals

Cyberaskari Limited

Software Engineer & Co-founder

May 2018 – Dec 2020
  • Engineered a Rails-based SaaS management system from inception to launch, serving over 2,400 active users and automating 90% of administrative reporting — reducing manual data entry by 30 hours per week
  • Owned the full product lifecycle for 3+ major applications — API design, data modelling, frontend integration, and CI/CD — cutting average feature delivery time by 25%

Projects

Cerebral Malaria RAG

Python ChromaDB Ollama HuggingFace

A retrieval-augmented generation system for medical research. Built a pipeline to ingest and embed research literature into ChromaDB, enabling semantic search and AI-powered Q&A over documents using local LLMs via Ollama and a Gradio web interface.

Axiom

Rails Hotwire

A payment and accounting application recording real-time payments and generating periodic reports in XLS format.

SpleetIt

Rails Python Hotwire

A web app that separates music into stems (vocals, drums) using Spleeter. Features drag-and-drop uploads, stem playback, and downloads.

Speaking

2024

DroidconKE & FlutterconfKE

Delivered a talk on Rails Hotwire Native for Android development, bridging the Rails and mobile development communities.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks

Ruby on Rails · Ruby · JavaScript · Python · Kotlin · React · Hotwire / Stimulus

Data & Infrastructure

PostgreSQL · Redis · AWS EC2 · AWS S3 · AWS RDS · AWS Lambda · AWS SQS · ElastiCache · Elastic Beanstalk · Terraform · Docker

Engineering Practices

REST API Design · Object-Oriented Design · CI/CD · Serverless Architecture · Payment Systems · Brakeman · Git · Agile

AI & ML

LLM Integration (OpenAI, Claude) · ChromaDB · HuggingFace · Ollama

Contact

Open to senior backend and Rails engineering roles — especially in fintech or payments.

Email turuthivictor9@gmail.com LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/victor-turuthi Phone +254 702 550 547