Alex Ndungu

Co-Founder + CTO

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Alex Ndungu

Backend systems, machine learning retrieval, and clean product-minded engineering for teams that care about reliability.

GitHubLinkedInLeetCodealexmeta517@gmail.com
Building CodePinion and Harlem Manage out of Nairobi

Co-Founder & CEO, CodePinion / Co-Founder & CTO, Harlem Manage

Alex Ndungu

Building the developer platform and the property operating system that African software teams and property firms run on.

What I'm buildingGet in touchResume

Companies building

2

Platforms live in production

2

Years coding

6+

Live systems pulse

How I think when building production software

System-aware engineering

Operating model

Realtime
RBAC + tenant isolation active
Akoko execution context loaded
Ledger-safe workflows online
Search + retrieval pipeline ready

Architecture loop

01
02
03
04
Model
Control
Observe
Refine

Selected systems

Production-minded work

Shipping

Harlem Manage

The company I lead as CTO. Harlem Manage is a Kenya-first operating system for property firms — multi-tenant core, role-aware AI execution, real-time M-PESA payment flows, and a production observability stack — scaling as the system landlords and agencies run their business on.

01

CodePinion

The company I founded and lead as CEO. CodePinion unifies git hosting, cloud dev environments, provisioned infrastructure, and project management into one AI-native platform — live in production on Kubernetes and scaling toward becoming the default place African software teams build and ship.

02

Catalog-Point

A full-stack library operations system with 5 core relational models, 2 user role types, a borrowing transaction engine with date-based cost calculation, and a deployment-ready Django stack.

03

E-Commerce Backend System

A backend commerce API built across 3 service domains (catalog, cart, order) with JWT-authenticated role-aware authorization, a relational schema optimized for checkout and order lifecycle workflows, and a separate React frontend — 2 public repos.

04

ML Search Engine

A 2-stage hybrid retrieval system trained on 45,000 StackOverflow records — SGD-based tag prediction for query expansion feeding into TF-IDF vectorization with cosine similarity ranking.

05

Movie Recommendation System

A 3-stage content-based recommendation pipeline — metadata extraction, vector representation, and cosine similarity scoring — that generates explainable suggestions with no user interaction data required.

06

2

Companies I found and lead

Live

Both platforms running in production

Kubernetes

Infrastructure both products scale on

M-PESA

Payment rail built for the African market

80%

Faster report delivery at Slade360

6+

Years coding, since 2020

How I build

Founder-led engineering, built to hold up at scale.

I build companies on architecture that survives growth: multi-tenant isolation, robust data flows, role-aware systems, and software that can be reasoned about, debugged, and extended long after the first version ships.

Co-Founder & CEO

CodePinion

An AI-native developer platform putting git hosting, cloud environments, infrastructure, and planning in one product — built for the teams every incumbent serves last.

Co-Founder & CTO

Harlem Manage

A Kenya-first operating system for property firms, with M-PESA as a native payment rail and AI execution built into the workflows.

What I'm building toward

Infrastructure companies for the African market — designed for how these teams actually operate, and architected to scale without a rewrite.

Featured projects

Selected work with strong backend, product, and AI systems signals.

These projects highlight how I approach architecture, domain problems, and production-ready implementation.

Harlem Manage
Multi-Tenant Real Estate Operating System

Harlem Manage

The company I lead as CTO. Harlem Manage is a Kenya-first operating system for property firms — multi-tenant core, role-aware AI execution, real-time M-PESA payment flows, and a production observability stack — scaling as the system landlords and agencies run their business on.

Harlem Manage is a Kenya-first, multi-tenant real estate operating system built for landlords, agencies, and property firms. It combines property workflows, tenant and lease management, financial reconciliation, communication channels, and Akoko, a deployed operational intelligence layer that adapts by role. We are building it as core infrastructure for African rental operations, not a management panel with a local coat of paint.

Next.jsDjangoDjango REST FrameworkPostgreSQLM-PESAWhatsApp/SMSAkoko AI

Multi-tenant

Organisation and property isolation

M-PESA

Native payment rail

Role-aware AI

Akoko execution layer

Architecture highlights

  • - Role-based AI agent system with dynamic tool selection per role — full audit trail per message for compliance
  • - M-PESA C2B STK Push with OAuth2, field-level encrypted credentials per organisation and property, and live payment status streamed via JWT-authenticated WebSocket consumers over Redis
Deep diveharlem.co.kePrivate Repo
CodePinion
AI-Native Developer Platform

CodePinion

The company I founded and lead as CEO. CodePinion unifies git hosting, cloud dev environments, provisioned infrastructure, and project management into one AI-native platform — live in production on Kubernetes and scaling toward becoming the default place African software teams build and ship.

CodePinion collapses the toolchain a team normally assembles from four vendors — a git host, a cloud IDE, a PaaS, and a project tracker — into a single product where AI is a first-class citizen rather than a bolted-on sidebar. Teams get on-demand containerised workspaces with live terminals and LSP support, a full git hosting layer with PR review and CI/CD, and one-click provisioned databases and app hosting. We are building it for a market that has been served last by every incumbent developer platform.

Django REST FrameworkNext.jsTypeScriptKubernetesDockerPostgreSQLCeleryRabbitMQMeilisearchAnthropic APIOpenAI APIFastAPI

AI-native

Agentic execution layer

Kubernetes

Production infrastructure

M-PESA

Built for the African market

Architecture highlights

  • - Pluggable runtime abstraction over Kubernetes and Docker execution backends — on-demand containerised dev workspaces with live terminals, LSP integration, and public-URL dev-server previews
  • - Agentic execution layer on a tiered permission model mirroring dashboard authorization: writes gated behind human confirmation, irreversible actions requiring typed confirmation plus emailed OTP
Deep divecodepinion.co.kePrivate Repo
Catalog-Point
Library Management System

Catalog-Point

A full-stack library operations system with 5 core relational models, 2 user role types, a borrowing transaction engine with date-based cost calculation, and a deployment-ready Django stack.

Catalog-Point is a Django-based library management system covering the full operational surface of a real library: inventory tracking, category management, borrowing workflows, cost calculation, approval states, return handling, and user activity history — for both librarians and members.

DjangoPythonPostgreSQLHTMLCSSJavaScriptDjango AllauthGunicorn

5

Core relational models

2

User role types

Deployed

Gunicorn + WhiteNoise

Architecture highlights

  • - 5 relational models: profiles, categories, books, costs, and transactions — covering the full operational surface
  • - 2 user role types with separated workflows: librarian administration and member-facing catalog access
Deep diveGitHub
E-Commerce Backend System
Production Backend Engineering Project

E-Commerce Backend System

A backend commerce API built across 3 service domains (catalog, cart, order) with JWT-authenticated role-aware authorization, a relational schema optimized for checkout and order lifecycle workflows, and a separate React frontend — 2 public repos.

A backend-first commerce platform focused on clear domain separation, predictable API behavior, and a schema that supports catalog, cart, and order lifecycles without coupling everything into a single service layer. Paired with a public React frontend repo.

JavaSpring BootPostgreSQLJWT AuthReactREST APIs

3

Service domains

JWT + RBAC

Auth layer

2 repos

Frontend + backend

Architecture highlights

  • - 3 service domains (catalog, cart, order) separated into composable, independently testable layers
  • - JWT-authenticated role-aware authorization enforced at the API boundary
Deep diveFrontendBackend
ML Search Engine
Hybrid ML Search & Retrieval System

ML Search Engine

A 2-stage hybrid retrieval system trained on 45,000 StackOverflow records — SGD-based tag prediction for query expansion feeding into TF-IDF vectorization with cosine similarity ranking.

A machine learning search system built on ~45,000 StackOverflow records. The key insight was that a single retrieval technique misses intent — so the pipeline runs in 2 stages: classify the query to predict missing context tags, then use those enriched tags to improve the similarity search.

PythonPandasscikit-learnTF-IDFNLP preprocessingCosine similarity

45K+

Training records

2-stage

Hybrid retrieval pipeline

SGD + TF-IDF

Model combination

Architecture highlights

  • - 45,000 StackOverflow records processed through an HTML cleaning, normalization, and tokenization pipeline
  • - 2-stage hybrid pipeline: SGD tag prediction for query expansion → TF-IDF + cosine similarity retrieval
Deep diveGitHub
Movie Recommendation System
Content-Based Recommendation Engine

Movie Recommendation System

A 3-stage content-based recommendation pipeline — metadata extraction, vector representation, and cosine similarity scoring — that generates explainable suggestions with no user interaction data required.

A content-based recommender that processes movie metadata through 3 explicit pipeline stages: feature extraction, vector representation, and similarity scoring. The design prioritizes explainability — every suggestion is traceable to specific shared metadata signals rather than opaque collaborative filtering.

PythonPandasscikit-learnFeature engineeringSimilarity modeling

3

Pipeline stages

Content-based

No user data needed

Explainable

Traceable recommendations

Architecture highlights

  • - 3-stage pipeline: metadata cleaning + feature extraction → vector representation → cosine similarity scoring
  • - Content-based approach requiring zero user interaction data — recommendations driven purely by metadata signals
Deep diveGitHub
Experience snapshot

Work shaped by product ownership, enterprise structure, and operational rigor.

The combination of CTO-level product building, informatics systems, and fintech experience informs how I think about data integrity, workflows, and software reliability.

Apr 2026 — Current

CodePinion

Co-Founder & CEO

Explore role

Jun 2025 — Current (part-time)

Harlem Manage

Co-Founder & CTO

Explore role

Oct 2025 – Jul 2026

Savannah Informatics

Software Engineer

Explore role

3 months

E&M Tech

Software Engineer Intern / Contract

Explore role

Capabilities

Backend foundations, operational AI, and a product sense for what matters.

Backend Engineering

REST API Design / Systems Design / Django / PostgreSQL / MySQL / Redis / RabbitMQ

ML / Data Science

TF-IDF & NLP / Classification / Similarity Models / scikit-learn / TensorFlow / OpenAI API

Programming

Data Structures & Algorithms / Python / Elixir / TypeScript / JavaScript / Java / React / Next.js / HTML / CSS

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS / EC2 / PostgreSQL RDS / S3 / Object Storage / Linux Server Administration / Nginx / Gunicorn / Daphne / SSL & Server Hardening / systemd / CI/CD & Deployment Automation / Grafana & Loki

Tools

Git / Linux / Docker / Grafana / Sentry / GlitchTip / Codex / Claude Code

View skill breakdown
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