Software Engineer · Lusaka, Zambia
About
George
CTO at Ballo Innovations and software engineer at Hytel. I design systems end to end — then build them with the team — especially where product decisions meet payments, messaging, offline mobile, and AI retrieval.
I came to software via Library & Information Science and Demography, then trained as a full-stack developer. Organising information so it can be found again turned out to be useful preparation for retrieval architecture. In the markets I work in, mobile money and SMS are how people actually pay and get notified — that shapes failure and reconciliation more than any framework has.
- Architecture
- Payments & messaging
- AI & retrieval
- Web & mobile
Where I work
I lead engineering at Ballo Innovations and build product at Hytel.
Dec 2023 — present
NowHybrid · Lusaka, Zambia
Ballo Innovations
Chief Technology Officer
- Own technical strategy and architecture across company products and client work.
- Lead the engineering team — architecture review, Git workflow, code review, documentation and delivery.
- Ship full-stack systems: web, APIs, mobile, CRM, advertising, messaging and AI platforms.
Nov 2025 — present
NowHybrid · US / Dubai / Zambia / Australia / Philippines
Hytel
Software Engineer
- Build and maintain production software across frontend and backend.
- Ship AI-assisted features on cloud services and LLM-enabled workflows.
Jul 2025 — Sep 2025
Remote · San Francisco Bay Area
Torre.ai
Software Engineer Intern
- Built full-stack product features in a fully remote engineering team.
Mar 2024 — Jun 2024
Remote · Geneva, Switzerland
Silverbrain AI
Front-End Developer Intern
- Shipped responsive Next.js interfaces wired to backend APIs.
How I work
Four habits. Each one shows up somewhere in the case studies.
- Write the decision down
- If the reasoning behind a boundary only lives in one head, the next person is guessing. An hour of writing beats another six-month argument. See a decision record
- Plan for the dependency being down
- Anything you call over a network will fail. What the system does then belongs in the design, not in a scramble afterwards. Offline reconciliation
- Ask what being wrong would cost
- Most decisions are made without complete information. I prefer options that are cheap to reverse over ones that feel clever. AI write confinement
- Know what it costs to run
- API calls, tokens and instance hours end up on a bill. I want a rough figure while choosing — not at month end.
Away from the diagram
Architecture is a team sport — most of it happens in front of a screen with other people arguing about it.
Hover to pause · click a tile to enlarge · ← / → to browse
What I work with
Grouped by the layer each tool sits in — says a little more than an alphabetical wall of logos.
Interface & Mobile
Web and mobile from the same design language, including apps that have to keep working when the connection does not.
- TypeScript
- React
- Next.js
- React Native
- Flutter
- Tailwind
- Offline-first
Services & APIs
Endpoint and payload design, and keeping the contract between client and server something the compiler can check.
- FastAPI
- NestJS
- .NET
- Node.js
- Ruby on Rails
- tRPC
- REST
AI & Retrieval
Most of the work in an LLM feature is getting the right context in front of the model and being able to tell whether it helped.
- Anthropic / Claude
- Groq
- OpenAI
- Gemini
- Vertex AI
- RAG
- Hybrid retrieval
- Embeddings
- Eval harnesses
Data & Infrastructure
Schemas shaped around how they will actually be read, and enough infrastructure to deploy them repeatably.
- PostgreSQL
- Supabase
- Prisma
- Firebase
- Docker
- GCP
- Vercel
Payments & Messaging
Mobile money and SMS are the default rails in the markets I build for, which makes them an architectural constraint rather than an integration detail.
- DPO Pay
- Mobile Money
- SMPP
- SMS gateways
- Firebase Cloud Messaging
- Webhook reconciliation
Architecture & Practice
The habits that let a small team keep changing a system quickly without losing track of why it is shaped the way it is.
- Hexagonal architecture
- Event-driven systems
- Monorepos
- ADRs
- CI/CD
- Vitest
- RSpec
- TypeScript strict
Lusaka · 2026
Say hi
George
M'sapenda
Software engineer & CTO in Lusaka. Reach me by email or the form on the contact page — I read everything and reply.
- GitHub
- c00p75
- georgemsapenda