South Africa · now
Whoosh
Senior Software Engineer
Senior engineer on a payment gateway for prepaid and postpaid electricity and traffic fines. We serve B2B partners over API and consumers directly, processing millions of transactions every year.
● Ian Odhiambo — software engineer · Nairobi, Kenya
Ian Odhiambo — senior software engineer building payment systems and financial infrastructure across Africa and Europe.
Senior software engineer with 5+ years shipping payment systems, marketplaces, CRMs and chatbot platforms across Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Belgium. Today I build payments infrastructure at Whoosh, a South African fintech processing millions of transactions.
01 · What I do
Messy problems in.
Working software out.
I'm a full-stack engineer, Angular and TypeScript on the front, Node.js and APIs on the back, SQL and NoSQL underneath, deployed on cloud infrastructure. But the tools are the easy part.
What I'm actually good at is taking a problem while it's still vague, a payment flow that keeps failing, a product that exists only as an idea, a system nobody fully understands anymore, giving it structure, and building it into something that works and keeps working. I've done it as a founder, as a payments lead, and as a technical lead reviewing the work of other engineers.
Most of that building has happened around money: payment gateways, settlement and reconciliation, booking and checkout flows, financial tools for farmers. Money software punishes sloppy thinking, which is exactly why I like it.
02 · The journey
Where I've been.
What connects it.
Nine stops across Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Belgium.
Companies I co-founded, teams I led, platforms I shipped. One stubborn throughline: I keep ending up building the part of the system where the money moves.
Payments & money movementFounding & leadingPlatforms & product buildsFoundation
Kenya / Rwanda
ValianFarms
Founder
Founded and built end-to-end: a farm-to-table platform connecting growers to buyers. Recognized by the Hult Prize and ALU Student Ventures awards.
Kenya · UN FAO backed
Farmshine
Software Engineer
Inventory and logistics software for smallholder farmers, an 80% upfront payment model, a mobile app built to work 70% offline, and over 1,000+ farmers reached.
Kenya
Zafari
Payments Lead
Led secure payment infrastructure for a travel booking platform, hardening the money path and measurably reducing booking drop off.
Kenya
Goomza
Technical Lead
Technical lead across 100 – 150 junior engineers, building PR review discipline and engineering standards at a scale where process is the product.
Belgium
it-volk
Software Engineer
CRM platform work for a Belgian software house, ground-up builds through post launch stabilization.
Belgium
SyndicYourself
Software Engineer
Property management platform, taking an existing product and making it dependable.
Belgium
Spotlights
Software Engineer
Talent matching platform connecting people to the work they should be doing.
Kigali, Rwanda
African Leadership University
BSc Computer Science
The foundation, computer science at ALU, where ValianFarms was born as an award winning student venture.
03 · Now — Whoosh, South Africa
Keeping the lights on.
Literally.
Millions
of transactions processed every year.
24/7
critical payments infrastructure
B2B + B2C
API partners and end customers alike
Whoosh is a South African fintech running payment rails for prepaid and postpaid electricity and traffic fines, the kind of infrastructure people rely on every single day. Partners integrate over our APIs; consumers pay us directly.
As a senior engineer on a small, sharp team, I own things end to end: partner API integrations, transaction processing, reconciliation, and the products customers actually touch. When payments infrastructure is this essential, reliability isn't a feature, it's the job.
04 · Contact
Let's build something.
A payments problem to solve, a product to build, or a team that needs a senior engineer, I'd love to hear about it. No forms, just reach out directly.