erick.africa
opento senior & staff roles · remote

I build production systems — from payment rails to real-time pipelines.

Senior backend engineer. Founded InstaEscrow, the M-Pesa escrow product for Kenya's social commerce market. Senior at SafeBoda. Previously at Bamboo (US investing for Africans) and Mindful Care (US healthcare). Eight years deep on Elixir, Go, and distributed systems.

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Live · simulated event stream

The kind of systems I build.

Every product I ship has a real-time backbone: Redis Streams, Phoenix Channels, server-sent events with replay. This stream previews the events flowing through InstaEscrow on a normal day: payments, escrow holds, dispute filings, wallet releases.

Phase 2: the same widget reading from a real Phoenix backend at live.erick.africa. Phase 1 ships with deterministic client-side events so the page is fast, static, and offline-safe.

live
  • 15:11instaescroworder.createdBuyer placed order #IE-4486, KES 850
  • 15:11autopaypayment.authorizedM-Pesa STK push confirmed, KES 1,250
  • 15:11instaescrowescrow.heldFunds held in escrow #ESC-5104
  • 15:11logisticsdelivery.dispatchedOrder #IE-0941 dispatched to courier
  • 15:11instaescrowdelivery.confirmedBuyer confirmed receipt, auto-release in 24h
  • 15:11autopaypayment.releasedReleased KES 18,000 to seller wallet
  • 15:11autopaywallet.payoutSeller withdrew KES 32,500 via Paystack transfer
  • 15:11arbiterdispute.openedDispute #DSP-7195 opened, buyer claims item not received

Selected work

Three case studies.

All work →
Founder · 2024 →Lead

InstaEscrow

Solo-built M-Pesa escrow platform for Kenya's social commerce market. Holds live payments today.

ElixirPhoenixPostgresRedisPaystack
Read case study
Senior · 2021 →Scale

SafeBoda

IAM rewrite, real-time dispatch, Kafka event processing for one of East Africa's largest ride-hailing platforms.

ElixirPhoenixKafkaGraphQL
Read case study
Full-stack · 2018–2021Healthcare

Mindful Care

Phoenix LiveView patient platform powering psychiatric urgent care across 8 US states.

ElixirLiveViewStripeTwilio
Read case study

Stack

What I reach for.

Languages
Elixir · TypeScript · Go · Dart · Python
Backend
Phoenix · NestJS · FastAPI · Absinthe (GraphQL) · Ecto · GenStage · Oban · Broadway
Frontend
React · Next.js · Vue · Nuxt · Flutter (BLoC) · Tailwind
Data
PostgreSQL · PostGIS · Redis · ETS/Nebulex · ElasticSearch · ClickHouse · Vespa
Real-time & messaging
Kafka · RabbitMQ · Redis Streams · Phoenix Channels · SSE · WebSockets
Infra
Docker · Kubernetes · AWS · Caddy · blue-green deploys · pgBackRest · Grafana/Loki