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- SaaS
- AI
- Next.js
- Django
Nairobi · remote · open to US roles
I build web products end to end — and ship small ones for fun.
Senior full-stack engineer in Nairobi with 6+ years building web products, most recently as Lead Engineer at lobstr. React and Next.js up front, Node.js, Python and PostgreSQL behind it. Now looking for the next team to build with.
- building production web apps
- 6+ yrs
- building production web apps
- from database schema to pixels
- End to end
- from database schema to pixels
- afternoons overlap US mornings
- UTC+3
- afternoons overlap US mornings
01 / What I do
Useful from the first commit.
Most of my work sits where product, data and frontend meet. I'm happiest owning a feature from the schema to the pixels.
- 01
Full-stack product engineering
I take a product from idea to production: data model, API, interface, deploys, and the monitoring that tells you it's still working next month.
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Docker
- AWS
- 02
Scraping & data pipelines
Scrapers that hold up against real websites, plus the platform and ETL pipelines behind them that turn messy sources into clean, queryable data. I've run pipelines processing 5M+ records a day and reworked PostgreSQL schemas to make the queries behind them 60% faster.
- Python
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- 03
Frontend / React
Fast, accessible interfaces in React and Next.js. I led a Next.js migration that cut initial load times by 40%, and I sweat the small details that make an app feel solid.
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- 04
Team leadership
As Lead Engineer at lobstr I guided the engineering team: technical direction, coding standards and code review, mentoring frontend and backend engineers, and a weekly alignment process that made delivery predictable.
- Mentoring
- Code review
- Delivery
02 / Shipped
Things I've built and put out there.
Products I've built and launched. Each one has a page with screenshots, how it works and the stack behind it.
- Live
LiveTurns a real estate listing into a finished short-form video: AI script, voiceover, motion, captions and music.
- SaaS
- AI video
- Next.js
- Prisma
- +more in progressFollow along on GitHub
03 / About
Engineer first, lead when it helps.
I'm Derrick, a full-stack engineer based in Nairobi. I like owning a problem all the way through: figuring out what people actually need, designing the data, writing the code and watching it run in production.
I've spent most of my career at lobstr, a data-collection platform. I joined in 2020 as a Python data engineer building scrapers and the ETL pipelines behind them, then worked across the platform itself as a React and senior React engineer, and most recently led the engineering team as Lead Engineer. Along the way I led the migration to Next.js that cut initial load times by 40%, built Node.js APIs handling 200K+ requests a day at 99.9% uptime, and set up CI/CD that took deploys from 45 minutes to 10.
In 2022 I also spent eight months at Megatherium building serverless React apps on AWS. Outside of work I build products to try ideas quickly; two of them are on this page. I'm now looking for a remote role with a US team where I can do the same thing at a bigger scale.
Experience
lobstrRemote
Lead Engineer
Aug 2026 – Oct 2026
Senior React Engineer
Mar 2023 – Aug 2026
React Engineer
Aug 2020 – Mar 2023
Python Data Engineer
Jan 2020 – Aug 2020
MegatheriumRemote
Application Engineer
May 2022 – Dec 2022
Education
BS, Applied Computer Technology
United States International University–Africa
Sep 2015 – Apr 2020
Stack
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Docker
- AWS
04 / Contact
Let's talk.
Hiring for a full-time role, need help with a project, or just want to say hi? Send a note and I'll get back to you.
Based in Nairobi (UTC+3). Happy to work US hours.