Today I handed in my work laptop and my badge. A simple, almost anticlimactic act, yet it carried the weight of nearly five years of my life.
I still remember my first day clearly — 5th July 2021. I woke up that morning more nervous than excited, which is very on-brand for me. New beginnings tend to do that. There is always a quiet anxiety underneath the anticipation. That small fear that the gap between who you are and where you have arrived might be wider than anyone realizes. Walking through those doors for the first time, that feeling was loud.
To say Safaricom is a big company is an understatement. With over 34 million M-PESA users in Kenya alone, the platform has become one of the most transformative financial services in sub-Saharan Africa.
When I received the email confirming I had been hired, it did not feel like just another job update. It felt like someone had opened a very serious door.
And with that comes scale. Real scale. The systems you touch are woven into how millions of Kenyans communicate, send money, pay bills, and run businesses every single day. You become aware of that responsibility very quickly.
Same Badge, Different Problems
Over 4 years and 7 months, I moved through four teams while supporting several more. Some transitions were planned. Others happened the way they often do — someone taps your shoulder and says, "We need you over here."
The common thread was integration. Connecting systems. Making things talk reliably. Making sure that when something breaks at 2 AM, there is enough observability to know exactly what went wrong and why.
Each project left its own lesson, but one early incident shaped me more than most. I deployed a high-traffic service that looked scalable on paper. In reality, I had skipped proper stress testing. Under load it slowed to a crawl, the backlog grew, and memory on the messaging service started climbing. What started as my problem quickly became everyone's problem.
After optimization, the service eventually handled 2000+ TPS, a number that has since doubled. But the lesson was never the throughput. It was that scalability assumptions mean nothing until production proves them right.
I have thought about performance and capacity differently ever since.
The People
If there is one thing I will carry most from these years, it is the people.
A company like Safaricom attracts people who take their craft seriously. I worked alongside engineers who could debate architecture with real conviction, who owned production incidents without deflecting, and who shared what they knew freely. Being around that kind of environment changes you slowly. The bar around you quietly becomes your own.
And of course, there were many engineers along the way who raised my standards without ever announcing that they were doing so.
When I first joined, I carried a quiet assumption that everyone in a company this large must be operating at a level far above mine. Reality turned out to be more human than that. Yes, I met some incredibly sharp people. I also had moments that reminded me organizations are always a mix of brilliance, average days, and everything in between.
Strangely, that realization was healthy. It replaced intimidation with responsibility. It made me focus less on measuring up and more on simply doing the work well.
Somewhere along the way, I also found myself on the other side of the equation. Supporting teammates. Sharing context. Watching people grow. There is a particular kind of satisfaction in seeing someone level up, knowing you played even a small part in it.
That part of the journey will stay with me.
The Other Side
No company is perfect, and a large one least of all.
Bureaucracy is real. At this scale, processes multiply, approvals pile up, and things that should be simple can take longer than they ought to. I learned to navigate that — to pick my battles, build the right relationships, and recognize that not every slow-moving process is pointless. Some of it is genuinely necessary. Some of it is just inertia. Learning to tell the difference is a skill in itself.
Then there are the people dynamics. Most of the leaders I worked under were genuinely good. They gave you space to think, challenged you without diminishing you, and created environments where raising concerns felt safe. Those experiences shaped how I think about leadership and what I would want to carry forward if I ever step into that role.
But in a company this large, you also encounter the other kind. The manager who mistakes authority for expertise. The one who treats a reasonable question like a challenge to their ego. I ran into a few of those over the years, and I won’t pretend it didn’t affect me. There’s a particular frustration in having a valid point and nowhere safe to take it.
What I came to realize is that these moments are less a people problem and more a process problem. Strong, thoughtful processes don’t just keep systems running — they protect people too. They create a structure where decisions have to be reasoned, where dissent has a voice, and where no single temperament can define the team. The organizations that get this right don’t rely on perfect managers. They build systems that make it hard for poor behavior to persist.
One thing Safaricom does very well is stability. And with stability comes comfort. In a large corporate environment, roles are specialized. You can become extremely good at your slice of the system, but the trade-off is breadth. In a startup, one engineer might carry a feature from design to production support. In a big company, each of those responsibilities is often its own role. That structure is safe. It’s also easy to get too comfortable.
If there’s one thing I will miss, it is that comfort. But I also know growth rarely happens in the most comfortable spot in the room. That lesson — that good culture and real growth are built intentionally, not assumed — is one I’ll carry for a long time.
What 1698 Days Actually Teaches You
There’s a version of a long tenure at one company that looks like stagnation. Same badge. Same building. Same job title, more or less.
That was not my experience.
I am leaving with sharper instincts than when I walked in. With a deeper respect for production reality. With a calm that only comes from watching enough systems fail, learning to fix them under pressure, and surviving the consequences. That calm is quiet but steady, the kind of confidence that doesn’t need to be shown off because it is built into the way you approach every problem.
I’ve learned lessons you can’t easily put on a CV: the intuition to design systems that endure, the judgment to balance speed with reliability, and the understanding that what works in theory often fails in practice. I know the difference between software built for the engineer who wrote it and software built for the person who will inherit it years later. I know the real cost of cutting corners, and I know the real cost of over-engineering.
I also leave with confidence in navigating large organizations, the ability to move through competing priorities, make things happen, and still deliver something meaningful. That kind of experience is hard won and carries weight beyond titles or metrics.
Safaricom gave me the environment to learn all of this, through real systems, real stakes, and real consequences. For that, I am deeply grateful.
Onwards
Closing this chapter feels strange in the way meaningful endings usually do. I’m a little nervous, carrying more excitement than I’ll outwardly show, and there’s a quiet question at the back of my mind — am I about to jump a curve?
Time will answer that.
For now, it’s enough to say that the foundation built over these 4 years and 7 months feels solid. Whatever gets built on top of it, I’m ready. I leave with gratitude for the lessons, respect for the people I worked with, and the sense that the most interesting problems are still ahead.