Nairobi · UTC+3 v.2026.05

Xavier Odhiambo

Senior Backend Engineer

I build backend systems for SaaS and civic-tech platforms across Africa — APIs, distributed pipelines, observability, the parts that have to keep working when nobody's watching.

01 /

About

Currently a Senior Software Engineer at Search Atlas, an agentic SEO platform — working on backend services that integrate Google Search Console, Analytics, Ads, and Meta Ads. Before that, I spent three years at Code for Africa building civic-tech platforms used by researchers and journalists across the continent.

I care about systems that hold up under real-world conditions — distributed services, observability-first design, careful database work, and software that works in low-bandwidth environments. AWS Solutions Architect certified. Open-source contributor to Django and CKAN.

02 /

Selected Work

Mediacloud Story-Indexer github.com/mediacloud
Python FastAPI RabbitMQ Elasticsearch Docker

Contributed to a distributed news ingestion pipeline operated by Mediacloud, a nonprofit research collaboration. The system tracks thousands of news sources and indexes hundreds of millions of stories used by researchers studying media ecosystems globally.

Sensors.Africa github.com/CodeForAfrica
Django DRF GeoDjango Celery PostgreSQL

Backend services for an IoT air-quality network across multiple African cities. Ingested and validated geo-tagged sensor readings; built async aggregation and reporting workflows tolerant of intermittent connectivity.

Wazimap-NG github.com/OpenUpSA
Django DRF GeoDjango PostgreSQL

Census and survey visualization platform with nested administrative geographies and demographic indicators. Tuned PostgreSQL for spatial queries serving interactive visualizations across multiple African countries.

11-node Elasticsearch cluster
Ansible Elasticsearch Kibana Elastic Rally

Designed and deployed the cluster with custom Ansible roles for re-indexing, Index Lifecycle Management, and Snapshot Lifecycle Management. Benchmarked indexing and search performance with Elastic Rally.

Self-hosted LLM platform
Ollama OpenWebUI

Led the deployment of a self-hosted LLM platform to complement commercial providers — providing a private option for workloads where data sovereignty over sources and predictable inference costs mattered most.

03 /

Open Source

Bug fixes and documentation contributions to the core project.

Extensions and plugin contributions for open dataset publishing platforms.