About

How I think about engineering.

I build and operate production systems for organisations where reliability is non-negotiable — financial services, healthcare AI platforms, and critical infrastructure. My work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud architecture, and operational excellence, translating technical decisions into business outcomes: uptime, resilience, regulatory confidence, and customer trust.

Brian Muli Muteti

Current

I am a DevOps Engineer at KCB Bank Kenya, in the bank's Technology division, working between the development and operations teams on how software reaches production. The remit is the delivery path itself: the CI/CD strategy a large development organisation releases through, the infrastructure that carries it from development and QA into production, and the standards — monitoring, capacity, recovery, and governance over how code versions move — that keep it predictable.

Day to day that means deploying applications across Azure, AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift, building the pipelines behind those deployments, GitOps delivery with Argo CD, and keeping container images, our own and our vendors', consistent and recoverable in internal registries. Because access to these environments is tightly controlled, I also work with development teams to troubleshoot their applications when something goes wrong.

The rest of the role is the part that outlasts any one release: building out automated testing and coverage reporting, coaching developers as they take on DevOps responsibilities of their own, and working with the teams behind a wide range of systems to choose tools that fit what they actually run.

About two months in, the bank's internal dependency repository was taking more requests than it should, and the build logs traced them to CI rather than to any application: a pipeline that fails or is cancelled never saves its dependency cache, so every rerun downloads the whole dependency tree again — thousands of requests, where a cached build needs almost none. Rather than stand up a separate dependency cache that would itself need securing and auditing, I kept the fix inside the build: a change to the shared Maven template, tested on healthy and failing pipelines, then rolled out to hundreds of Azure DevOps pipelines without touching application code. Cached builds now make no repository requests at all, and the root-cause write-up ranks the failing pipelines to fix first.

In October I took on the move of the bank's public website off a vendor's hosting and onto the bank's own cloud. I owned the delivery end to end and was the bank's technical point of contact with the vendor, who still develops the site. The work was as much coordination as engineering: agreeing how the vendor's changes reach production, building the pipelines that package the site as a container image and deploy it to Azure App Service, and working with security and architecture on the cut-over. It has been live on the new platform since 13 October.

Background

Before joining KCB, I was Lead Site Reliability Engineer for Africa at Qure.ai, deploying AI-assisted diagnostic platforms into hospitals in Kenya. Earlier, I worked as a DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer at another Tier-1 East African bank, supporting mission-critical banking and payments platforms. The work documented in my case studies comes from that period.

Over the course of my career, I have worked across cloud architecture, platform engineering, observability, incident response, automation, and large-scale system modernisation. I am particularly interested in building systems that remain simple to operate even as they grow in complexity.

I hold a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Technical University of Mombasa, and I am a registered Graduate Engineer with the Engineering Board of Kenya.

How I work

I view reliability as a business outcome rather than a technical metric. The systems I build are observable, fault-tolerant, and designed for the engineers who operate them—not just the engineers who build them.

I place a strong emphasis on automation, documentation, operational readiness, and post-incident learning. Whether responding to a production incident, designing a platform, or leading a migration, my goal is the same: leave the system and the team in a better state than I found them.

I believe engineering leadership is earned through ownership, clear communication, and consistency during high-pressure situations.

Beyond Engineering

Outside of my full-time role, I served as Head of Operations for the Association of Energy Professionals in Eastern Africa (AEPEA) from 2024 to 2026, where I supported operational initiatives, technology programmes, and organisational growth.

Certifications

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is by email. I am also active on LinkedIn and occasionally write on Medium about cloud engineering, reliability, platform operations, and emerging technologies.