I build platform infrastructure that has to survive without me.
I'm Marvin Kweyu - a senior platform and backend engineer. I build the layer products take for granted: the part that stays reliable, observable, and operable long after it ships to environments I'll never log into.
My Journey
Over six years at the intersection of research and production - an MSc in Research Methods alongside the engineering.
Today my work lives at the platform layer: NavEngine runs on hardware owned by 58 organisations across four countries. Once it ships, failures arrive as support tickets, not log lines I can read - so I design for systems I'll never touch again.
Research Focus
My research models foot-and-mouth disease across Kenya and projects how outbreak risk shifts under climate change. I tackle:
- Ecological niche modelling: MaxEnt in R over bioclimatic, topographic, and livestock-density predictors.
- Spatial epidemiology: hotspot and cluster analysis (Getis-Ord Gi*, KDE) in QGIS and Google Earth Engine.
- Climate projection: CMIP6 SSP scenarios mapped to policy-relevant risk surfaces.
Engineering Philosophy
- Pragmatic architecture: start simple; add complexity only when the deployment demands it.
- Observability first: for systems you can't SSH into, observability is the interface, not a feature.
- Design for the constraint: engineer for your hardest environment; reliability carries to the rest.
Beyond Work
When I'm not building or writing, I read - mostly history and science fiction. I write about the systems I build in three series, Distributed Systems Field Notes, Software Architecture and Research & Building, on working across both at once. I contribute to the open-source projects I depend on.