Senior software engineer · Nairobi, Kenya

Victor
Turuthi

I build payment systems that are boring on purpose.

Six years in fintech, almost all of it in payments — designing integrations, building backend infrastructure, and owning systems end to end from architecture through production support. I care about code quality, long-term maintainability, and raising the level of the teams I work in.

Get in touch GitHub LinkedIn

Open to senior backend and Rails roles

01

Talks

RubyConf Africa · 2026 · latest

The Reviewable Codebase

Architecture and performance gates in Ruby. What Stripe and Spotify did to trust code they did not write, and the four properties that make a codebase cheap to review.

Open the deck →
2026

The Reviewable Codebase — examples

Every gate, budget and boundary from the talk, runnable.

github →
2025

Foreign Function Interface in Ruby

RubyConf Africa. Calling native code from Ruby, and what it costs.

RubyConf Africa
2024

Concurrency in Ruby

RubyConf Africa. Threads, Ractors, and how the machine really works.

RubyConf Africa
2024

Rails Hotwire Native for Android

DroidconKE & FlutterconKE. Bridging the Rails and mobile communities.

DroidconKE
02

Selected work

01

Payment broker service

Consolidated several third-party payment provider integrations into a single reliable backend layer. Cut server costs by more than half and materially improved uptime.

RailsPostgreSQLRedisPayments
02

Cerebral Malaria RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation over medical research. A pipeline that ingests and embeds literature into ChromaDB for semantic search and Q&A, using local models through Ollama behind a Gradio interface.

PythonChromaDBOllamaHuggingFace
03

Axiom

Payment and accounting application recording payments in real time and generating periodic reports.

RailsHotwire
04

SpleetIt

Separates music into stems with Spleeter — drag-and-drop uploads, stem playback and downloads.

RailsPythonHotwire
03

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 production support
  • Architected a payment broker service consolidating multiple third-party payment integrations into one backend layer — over 50% lower server costs and significantly improved uptime
  • Optimised PostgreSQL and Redis (ElastiCache) performance, eliminating N+1 queries and reducing latency on high-traffic payment endpoints
  • Migrated background job processing to serverless (AWS Lambda, SQS) — 60% faster processing, 30% lower infrastructure cost
  • Upgraded legacy Rails applications through several major versions, managing breaking changes and paying down technical debt
  • Established CI/CD pipelines with automated linting and security scanning
  • Mentored junior engineers and contributed to architectural decisions

Cyberaskari Limited

Software Engineer & Co-founder

May 2018 — Dec 2020
  • Engineered a Rails SaaS management system from inception to launch, serving over 2,400 active users and automating 90% of administrative reporting — 30 fewer hours of manual data entry a week
  • Owned the full lifecycle of three major applications — API design, data modelling, frontend integration and CI/CD — cutting average feature delivery time by 25%
04

Stack

Languages & frameworks

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

Data & infrastructure

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

Engineering practice

REST API design · Object-oriented design · CI/CD · Serverless · Payment systems · Brakeman · Git · Agile

AI & ML

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

05

Contact

Let's talk about payments, Rails, or a talk you want given.

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

Emailturuthivictor9@gmail.com LinkedInvictor-turuthi GitHubturuthivic Xturuthi_vick