Munywele Sammy Barasa

Key Achievements:

• Led the technical presentation of AKILIMO digital tools to the Tanzanian government (Oct 2022), resulting in official adoption and integration into Tanzania's national agricultural extension system - a direct policy impact across millions of smallholder farmers.
• Architected and built an Android application used by farmers and extension agents across 5+ countries to generate accurate, personalized cassava planting recommendations, reducing guesswork and improving crop yields.
• Designed and implemented a PostgreSQL-backed recommendation engine and request logging system, enabling the team to track usage patterns and inform product decisions across multiple African markets.
• Translated R statistical models developed by agronomists and data scientists into production REST APIs (Spring Boot/Kotlin), making previously inaccessible research actionable for field agents.
• Configured and maintained full CI/CD pipelines for API and mobile app releases using CircleCI, Jenkins, and GitHub Actions cutting release cycle time and eliminating manual deployment errors.
• Provisioned and managed production and development infrastructure on DigitalOcean, balancing performance, cost efficiency, and environment reproducibility using Docker.
• Built a management reporting dashboard tracking adoption and usage of digital tools, used by leadership for strategic decision-making.
• Developed automation scripts that processed field trial data submitted to the ONA platform, feeding downstream systems including the recommendations API.

Key Achievements:

• Designed and implemented the AgDX API specification using OpenAPI/Swagger to standardize the exchange of plant pest and disease data across international agricultural systems.
• Built and deployed a demo website showcasing the AgDX REST API to stakeholders and potential partner organizations.
• Led bi-weekly stakeholder meetings with agronomists and program managers remotely in Peru, translating technical progress into clear non-technical updates.
• Worked directly with agronomists to map plant pest and disease taxonomies into structured data models, ensuring scientific accuracy in the API schema.
• Managed project tasks and sprint planning on Jira in collaboration with the program manager, maintaining delivery timelines across a fully remote international team.

Main achievements:

• Designed and developed the database schema for processing customer data using Oracle 11g.
• Developed design specifications for the REST API that was used to integrate the front-end with the back-end for bank account opening.
• Implemented API specifications using Spring Boot and Kotlin and ensured secured endpoints using JWT authentication.
• Set up and maintained production, UAT, and development servers to be used within the project on the openshift platform.
• Implemented JIRA tasks per the week's sprint requirements and agreement.
• Participated in sprint planning to prioritize tasks and deliverables.
• Provided user stories to the scrum master for refinement based on technical evaluation and analysis of system design and requirements.
• Participated in committees for evaluating new vendor systems and providing recommendations to management.
• Mentored and trained junior developers as well as provided onboarding for new technical staff.
• Worked with other senior developers to design and implement development workflows to ensure smooth collaboration, easy deployment, and fast bug resolution.
• Was in charge of a squad for the development of the customer onboarding platform and acted as the liaison for the developers and product owner in terms of task prioritization and estimates.
• Wrote and maintained technical documentation for the onboarding platform REST API and deployment workflow.
• Participated in candidate technical interview process and HR recommendations.
• Prepared monthly topics for presentation to the entire team regarding technology, life, and general life experiences as a way of fostering team cohesion.
• Migrated onboarding REST API from Java to Kotlin resulting in a cleaner codebase and reducing technical debt.