Gitonga Mwaura

AI Lead

Gitonga Mwaura is a results-driven Head of AI Engineering with over eight years of experience delivering high-performance digital solutions across government, fintech, martech, and social commerce sectors. He brings a full-stack and infrastructure perspective to applied AI, combining production backend engineering with retrieval systems, multi-agent orchestration, and DevOps. Gitonga excels at moving AI capabilities from prototype to national-scale deployment, architecting the data pipelines and APIs that make them useful, and aligning technical decisions with business outcomes. His technical expertise spans Laravel and PHP, Python with FastAPI, and TypeScript with Next.js, alongside Go and Vue.js from earlier product work. On the AI side he builds retrieval-augmented generation pipelines from vector search, custom embeddings, and industry-scale web scraping, working with LangChain and the OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek APIs. His data experience covers PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis, with Celery for distributed processing. He has hands-on DevOps experience across AWS, Digital Ocean, and Docker, and applies Agile delivery, CI/CD, and disciplined unit testing to keep production stable. At Belva Digital he designs and deploys multi-agent platforms for clients in e-commerce, banking, insurance, travel, and healthcare, and helps shape the AI roadmap for one of Kenya's leading MarTech agencies. At the Judiciary of Kenya he led the platform architecture behind national e-Filing and Case Tracking systems, spearheaded the digitization of millions of case files through the AJIRA platform now deployed across 174 courts, and delivered an AI transcription service processing thousands of hearing recordings daily. Earlier, as a core engineer at Chpter, his backend and infrastructure work supported a social commerce platform through a $1.2M seed round and expansion into three African markets. He also founded StartupHub.Africa, growing it to 2,500+ startups, 3,500+ investors, and 4,500+ newsletter subscribers on programmatic SEO pipelines he built himself.