case study · frontend developer → senior → lead · 2021 — 2026
Pesawise.Payments, built for businesses.
Nairobi, Kenya
pesawise.com ↗PesaBiz — Play Store ↗Pesawise Business — App Store ↗Pesawise Go — Play Store ↗Pesawise is a Kenyan payments platform: accounts, cards, transfers and payment rails for businesses, with a consumer app alongside. I spent five years there and grew from Frontend Developer to leading the frontend team.
I built the products end to end — PesaBiz, the business payments app, in React Native; Pesawise Go, the consumer app, in Flutter; the business banking dashboard in Next.js with real-time balances over STOMP; and an embeddable checkout businesses integrate to receive payments.
As lead I restructured the codebase around a Lerna monorepo of shared payment libraries, moved the marketing site from Next.js to Astro for speed, wired production monitoring through Sentry, and worked with compliance on audit readiness — while managing a small, fast-moving team of engineers.
stack
- React Native
- Flutter
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Mantine
- TanStack Query
- Zustand
- STOMP
- Astro
- Sentry
- Lerna
Two apps, two stacks
The business app in React Native and the consumer app in Flutter — parallel payment products sharing one design language and one backend.
Real money, real time
Balances and transactions stream over STOMP/WebSocket into the dashboard and apps; the payment gateway was rebuilt mid-flight without downtime.
From dev to lead
Three roles in five years: migrated CRA to Next.js as a dev, shipped the mobile apps as a senior, and ran the team and architecture as lead.
the work
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