Hi!
I'm PETER BARASA
Cloud-Native Backend and DevOps Engineer
Building scalable, secure, cloud-native fintech and SaaS systems.
TL;DR for Humans
I design and build high-performance backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps pipelines with a strong focus on security, scalability, reliability and cost optimization.
My Engineering Philosophy
I design and engineer mission-critical financial technology systems where 99.99% uptime is the baseline, not the objective. My work focuses on rigorous architectural standards, including microservices-driven system design and the implementation of secure, observable, and scalable DevSecOps pipelines.
My motivation is to create architectures for:
Infrastructure that can earn and support millions of user requests with less than 1 second delay.
Cloud technology that can be used without having to change the current system if it needs to grow in size.
Security and privacy plans that use the most up-to-date standards as identified by PCI-DSS,
KYC/AML,
and ISO 27001.
Systems that have capabilities to monitor themselves so that potential problems will be discovered before a customer experiences them.
Provide teams with tools that allow them to write infrastructure code and create a workflow to deploy it using GitOps.
Target Impact Areas
I've worked in:
Architecture & System Design Expertise
Cloud-Native Architecture
• Microservices orchestration with service mesh patterns Istio, Linkerd
• Event-driven architectures using Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS EventBridge
• API gateway patterns with rate limiting, circuit breakers, retry logic
• Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) patterns for mobile-first experiences
• Serverless architectures leveraging Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway
Mobile-Backend Integration
• Super app architecture design (mini-app frameworks, SDK integration)
• Mobile-first APIs with GraphQL, gRPC, REST
optimized for low-bandwidth environments
• Session resilience and offline-first synchronization patterns
• Device attestation and secure mobile authentication flows
• Real-user monitoring (RUM) and mobile crash analytics integration
Security & Compliance
• Zero Trust architecture implementation (identity-based perimeter, least privilege)
• OAuth2/OIDC
flows, JWT lifecycle management, API key rotation
• Secrets management with HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager
• Penetration testing mindset: threat modeling, secure coding, OWASP Top 10
• FinTech compliance: PCI-DSS controls,
KYC/AML data
handling, GDPR
privacy by design
Technical Arsenal
Cloud Platforms & Infrastructure
AWS
PRIMARYEC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, API Gateway
Designing multi-AZ, fault-tolerant architectures
Cost optimization through right-sizing and reserved capacity
Security groups, IAM policies, VPC design
Azure
IAM, Security Groups, VPC, WAF, CSPM, Cloud Workload Protection
Shared responsibility model implementation
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
Modularized, reusable IaC templates
State management and drift detection
Multi-environment provisioning (dev/staging/prod)
Containerization
Docker, Kubernetes (EKS, OpenShift), Helm
Deployment strategies: blue-green, canary, rolling updates
Resource optimization and auto-scaling policies
Service mesh integration for observability
Backend Engineering & APIs
Java Ecosystem
Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Hibernate
• RESTful microservices with circuit breakers
• Async processing with Spring WebFlux
• Transaction management across distributed systems
Python Stack
FastAPI, Django, Flask, Tornado
• High-performance async APIs (10k+ req/sec)
• Background task processing with Celery, Redis
• ML model serving with FastAPI
Node.js
Express, NestJS
• Real-time features with WebSockets, SSE
• Middleware-based auth/authorization
• Event-driven architectures with message queues
Performance Engineering
Go, Rust (learning)
• Low-latency microservices for payments
• gRPC for inter-service communication
API Design
REST, GraphQL (Apollo), gRPC, OpenAPI/Swagger
• API versioning strategies, backward compatibility
• Rate limiting, throttling, and quota management
• Comprehensive documentation with code examples
Databases & Data Layers
PostgreSQL
Advanced SQL, indexing strategies, stored procedures
Query optimization for high-transaction systems
Replication (master-slave, multi-master)
JSONB for semi-structured data
NoSQL
MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra
Schema design for horizontal scalability
Partition key strategies for DynamoDB
Change Data Capture (CDC) patterns
Caching & Real-Time
Redis, Memcached
Cache invalidation strategies (TTL, event-based)
Pub/sub for real-time notifications
Session management and rate limiting
Messaging Systems
Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS/SNS
Event sourcing and CQRS patterns
Dead letter queues and retry mechanisms
Exactly-once delivery guarantees
DevSecOps & CI/CD
CI/CD Pipelines
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Tekton
• Multi-stage builds (test → security scan → deploy)
• Automated rollback on deployment failures
• Feature flagging for progressive rollouts
Security Automation
• SonarQube, Checkmarx
for code quality & vulnerability scanning
• Snyk, Trivy for
container image scanning
• OWASP Dependency-Check
for supply chain security
• Automated secrets scanning git-secrets, TruffleHog
GitOps
FluxCD, ArgoCD
• Declarative infrastructure management
• Automated sync from Git → Kubernetes
• Environment promotion workflows
Linux Administration
Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS
• Shell scripting (Bash, Python, Groovy)
• System hardening, firewall rules (iptables, firewalld)
• Process monitoring and performance tuning
Observability & Site Reliability
Metrics
Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace
Custom metrics and alerting rules
SLI/SLO/SLA definition and tracking
Business metrics dashboards
Logging
ELK Stack, Splunk
Centralized log aggregation
Log correlation for distributed tracing
Anomaly detection with ML-powered alerts
Distributed Tracing
OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Zipkin
Request flow visualization across microservices
Latency bottleneck identification
Context propagation in async systems
AIOps
Machine Learning for operations
ML for RCA, anomaly detection
Classification/clustering for log analysis
Automated incident correlation
Security & Identity Management
Authentication & Authorization
• OAuth2/OIDC, SAML, JWT, API Keys
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based (ABAC)
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) integration
Security Tools
• Firewalls: Next-Gen Palo Alto, Fortinet,
AWS WAF
• IDS/IPS: Snort, Suricata
• PAM: CyberArk, BeyondTrust
• Vulnerability scanners: Nessus, Qualys, OpenVAS
Compliance & Governance
• ISO 27001, NIST Framework, CIS Controls
• PCI-DSS payment
security standards
• GDPR data
protection principles
• Audit trail logging and evidence collection
AI/ML Integration
Model Deployment
• OpenAI APIs, Hugging Face Transformers
• TensorFlow Serving, TorchServe, ONNX Runtime
• Model versioning and A/B testing
• ML-powered features: fraud detection, chatbots, recommendations
ML for Operations
• Predictive scaling based on traffic patterns
• Anomaly detection in system metrics
• Automated incident classification
Featured Projects & Implementations
Enterprise FinTech Authentication Service
IN DEVELOPMENTProduction-grade authentication for systems handling 100k+ daily active users
Architecture
• Spring Boot microservice with JWT + OAuth2 flows
• PostgreSQL with row-level security for multi-tenancy
• Redis for token blacklisting and session management
• AWS ECS Fargate deployment behind Application Load Balancer
• Nginx reverse proxy with SSL termination
Security Features
• Device fingerprinting and anomaly detection
• Rate limiting per user/IP (100 req/min)
• Audit logs for all authentication events
• Compliance with PCI-DSS password policies
Observability
• Prometheus metrics (login success rate, latency p95/p99)
• Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry
• Grafana dashboards for real-time monitoring
Cloud-Native E-Commerce Platform
70% COMPLETEScalable microservices architecture demonstrating DevOps excellence
Tech Stack
• Backend: Python (FastAPI), Node.js (NestJS), Java (Spring Boot)
• Database: PostgreSQL (orders), MongoDB (catalog), Redis (cart/sessions)
• Messaging: RabbitMQ for async order processing
• Infrastructure: Terraform → AWS EKS + RDS + ElastiCache
DevOps Pipeline
• GitHub Actions for CI/CD
• Blue-green deployments with automatic rollback
• Infrastructure drift detection
• Cost tracking per environment ($150/month for staging)
Observability Stack
• Prometheus + Grafana for metrics | ELK Stack for centralized logging | Jaeger for distributed tracing
• Custom SLO tracking (99.9% uptime, <500ms p95 latency)
Production Observability Platform
60% COMPLETEEnd-to-end monitoring solution for microservices environments
Components
• Metrics: Prometheus
with custom exporters
• Visualization: Grafana with 15+
pre-built dashboards
• Logging: Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana
• Alerting: AlertManager →
Slack/PagerDuty integration
Features
• Automatic service discovery in Kubernetes
• Pre-configured alerts (CPU/Memory/Disk, API errors, database connections)
• Log correlation with trace IDs
• Cost analysis dashboards (AWS CloudWatch costs per service)
DevSecOps Pipeline Template
READYReusable CI/CD pipeline with security-first approach
Pipeline Stages
1. Build: Multi-stage Docker builds
2. Test: Unit, integration, contract tests
3. Security: SonarQube, Snyk, secrets detection
4. Deploy: Kubernetes rolling update
5. Verify: Smoke tests, rollback on failure
Security Gates
• No critical/high vulnerabilities in production
• Code coverage >80% required
• OWASP dependency scan pass
Tools: GitHub Actions, SonarQube, Trivy, ArgoCD
Continuous Learning & Certifications
Pursuing (2025)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
• TOGAF 9 Certified (Enterprise Architecture)
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Active Learning
• SAFe Agile Framework (for enterprise architecture roles)
• Rust for high-performance microservices
• Advanced Kubernetes patterns (service mesh, multi-cluster)
• FinTech regulations (PSD2, Open Banking standards)
Domain Expertise: FinTech & Payments
Understanding of:
• Mobile money ecosystems (M-Pesa, Airtel Money architecture)
• Payment gateway integrations (Stripe, Flutterwave, Paystack)
• Transaction lifecycle management
• Fraud detection patterns
• Regulatory compliance: KYC/AML, PCI-DSS, GDPR
Business Context:
• East African market dynamics (mobile-first, low bandwidth)
• Super app strategies (financial services + commerce + utilities)
• Agent network management for cash-in/cash-out
• Cross-border remittance systems
Engineering Principles
Architecture
• Start with Minimum Viable Architecture—build incrementally
• Design for testability, deployability, and observability from day one
• Embrace evolutionary design
• Decoupling deployments from releases
Security
• Shift-left security—integrate checks in CI/CD
• Zero Trust mindset—verify every request
• Defense in depth—multiple security layers
Operations
• Automate toil—if you do it twice, script it
• Observability over monitoring—understand why things fail
• Blameless post-mortems—learn and improve
Collaboration
• Documentation is code—Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), runbooks, API specs
• Mentorship mindset—uplift team capabilities through pair programming, code reviews
• Agile pragmatism—Scrum/Kanban as tools, not dogma
Education & Background
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Relevant coursework: Operating Systems, Cloud Computing, Data Structures, Algorithms, Database Systems, Network Security, Software Engineering
Professional Experience
• 3+ years hands-on software development in production environments
• Experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Exposure to large-scale distributed systems
• Cross-functional collaboration (product, design, security, ops teams)
Let's Connect
I'm passionate about building technology that drives financial inclusion and economic empowerment. If you're working on:
Mobile payment platforms or super apps
Cloud-native SaaS products at scale
DevSecOps transformation initiatives
High-reliability fintech systems
I'd love to collaborate!
Nairobi, Kenya | Remote/Hybrid
Quick Reference
Primary Skills: Cloud Architecture | Backend Engineering | DevSecOps | FinTech Systems
Cloud: AWS (expert), Azure (intermediate)
Languages: Java, Python, Golang, C++, Node.js, SQL, Bash
Focus Areas: Payment Systems, Microservices, Security, Observability
Career Stage: Transitioning to Senior/Architect roles