Sigu Magwa
Build systems that scale, not teams that struggle.
I redesign the process, connect the systems behind it, and leave the team able to run it without me.
Worked with teams at
Most of the time the problem is not obvious at first. It shows up as work taking longer than it should, teams constantly following up, and key people becoming bottlenecks without meaning to. Underneath, the pattern is usually the same.
That is the real failure, and it is the one I go after.
The goal is a business that runs on systems, not on specific people holding everything together.
Map how work actually flows through the business and find the structural bottleneck rather than treating symptoms.
Simplify processes and architecture, removing the manual dependencies that cap capacity.
Connect systems so data moves without human intervention, and automate rule-based work such as approvals, reconciliation and reporting.
Leave the organisation able to run and extend the work without me.
Weekly reconciliation that took hours now runs automatically.
Approval cycles that stalled in inboxes now move instantly through defined logic.
Reporting that required manual assembly becomes real-time visibility.
A few engagements, described as the problem I was brought in to solve.
An eight-year Phoenix system tracking volunteer teachers across clustered Kenyan schools: attendance ingested from field tablets over poor connectivity, pay calculated and approved from that attendance and settled over mobile money, and every change signed by the person who made it.
Read the case study
Featured case studyFifteen to thirty neighbours, three ledger books and a treasurer doing compound interest by hand. A Phoenix LiveView platform replaces it with a shared, auditable record: savings, loans, penalties, welfare funds and the end-of-cycle share-out, with the money arithmetic isolated in a pure module and the loan ledger made immutable by the database itself.
Read the case study
Featured case studyA utility billing from records that no longer matched the ground. Around 14,000 anomalies reviewed against field survey data, the resolvable ones corrected through the utility's own change control, and five departmental procedures rewritten so the same anomalies stopped being generated in the first place.
Read the case study
Problem
A critical operation in a large-scale warehouse management system was taking more than a minute, slowing down daily operations.
What I did
Rewrote the implementation, fixed the bottleneck underneath it, and moved the team onto CI/CD with Jenkins and Docker.
Result
60+ seconds to 3 seconds
Developer experience improved across the other projects too.
Technology
Jenkins · Docker · CI/CD
Problem
An established Ruby on Rails codebase needed to move onto a new application framework without stalling delivery.
What I did
Migrated the codebase into Phoenix, wrote new features and services, and reviewed code across a fully asynchronous team spread across time zones, working through written specification rather than meetings.
Result
The platform moved onto a framework better suited to high-concurrency workloads, delivered by a distributed team with minimal synchronous overhead.
Technology
Ruby on Rails · Elixir · Phoenix
Problem
A big, established monolith that new engineers found slow to become productive in.
What I did
Built new back-end features and services, writing code that would still be easy to understand and modify six months later, and wrote and maintained living documentation that improved the onboarding process.
Result
A codebase and onboarding path new engineers could join without depending on tribal knowledge.
Technology
Elixir · monolith architecture
Problem
Clients across several industries needed systems built, but the delivery capacity to do it did not exist.
What I did
Founded Podii and built the practice. We diagnose the business problem before agreeing what to build, run short delivery cycles so clients see working software early, and hire and mentor the engineers who deliver it.
Result
Grew from a two-person startup into a consultancy delivering systems for clients across multiple industries, with more than 30 engineers recruited and mentored.
Technology
Elixir · Phoenix · AWS · mobile
Also contracted with Adobe, building and maintaining back-end services for the Creative Cloud team. See the full career history.
Organisations whose technology has stopped keeping up with the business.
I work directly with executives and organisations on technology strategy, systems transformation and engineering leadership. Where the work needs a full delivery team, it runs through Podii, the consultancy I founded.
I speak about building software under pressure, observability, and growing technology communities.
I am an engineering leader and technology consultant with over a decade of experience designing, building and scaling digital products across agriculture, finance, logistics and public services. I have contracted with Adobe, Fly.io, Frame.io and Pulpo, and I founded Podii.
I co-founded ElixirConf Africa and Elixir Kenya, and I am currently studying for an Executive MBA at Strathmore Business School, deliberately widening from technical execution toward business and technology leadership.
Let's figure out what is actually broken. Tell me what the work looks like today and where it keeps getting stuck.
Thank you, that has been sent.
I read everything myself and normally reply within a couple of working days.