Nairobi County, Kenya Available for consulting

Phillip Mwaniki

IT Consultant Systems Integrator Backend Engineer

I have been building web software since 2011, with a strong focus on the backend using PHP (Laravel). Today, I lead engineering at Wonderkid Multimedia — and spend my nights writing Table X in Rust.

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Phillip Mwaniki
  • 15+ Years shipping software
  • 5 Countries worked across
  • 13 Companies & clients
  • 1 Open-source SQL client

01 About

Technology as leverage, for systems that serve people.

My mission is to use technology to bring structure, efficiency and fairness to systems that serve people — especially where those systems are broken or neglected — and to pass on that knowledge, so others can build too.

That has meant a lot of different rooms over fifteen years: refactoring a crypto wallet for a New York studio, integrating ad platforms for an analytics product in Vilnius, scraping constitutions for a legal-tech team in the UK, leading a hospital system migration in Nairobi. The through-line is the same — take something tangled, give it a clean architecture, and leave the team better equipped than I found them.

I’m currently leading the engineering charge at Wonderkid Multimedia, and honestly? We’re on a mission to fix how Africa gets its water. We’re building an ERP from the ground up that’s part logistics, part revolution—streamlining the entire delivery process so that clean water doesn’t just exist, but actually reaches the people who need it, faster and smarter than ever before.

Focus
High-performance APIs, system architecture
Primary stack
PHP (Laravel), MySQL, Vue
Also
Engineering & executive-level management
Languages
English

02 Experience

Fifteen years,
thirteen companies.

  1. Apr 2022 — Present

    Nairobi, Kenya

    Wonderkid Multimedia Current

    Head of Engineering

    Jan 2025 — Present

    • Building an ERP platform for the water sector.
    • Redefining water delivery via bowsers.

    Senior Software Engineering Consultant

    Apr 2022 — Dec 2024

    • Developed applications using PHP.
    • Shipped updates to mobile apps using Java for Android.

  2. Jun 2011 — Jun 2025

    Nairobi, Kenya

    Philsoft Limited

    Senior Software Consultant

    May 2019 — Jun 2025

    • Built bespoke solutions for clients.
    • Helped teams migrate to a modern development workflow — Git, unit and feature testing, and CI/CD in their engineering pipeline.

    Software Engineer

    Jun 2011 — Jun 2019

    Laravel · MySQL · Android (Java) · CentOS

    • Ran a consultancy practice delivering IT solutions and cloud-based products for clients.
    • Advised clients on technology integration, long-term benefit evaluation, and IT equipment procurement.

  3. Sep 2022 — May 2023

    Nairobi, Kenya

    Maat Systems East Africa

    Senior Software Engineer

    • Led a team of 4 developers migrating an existing hospital system to Laravel with an MVC architecture, improving application performance by over 30%.
    • Supported the server infrastructure and handled deployments via CI/CD.
    • Liaised with clients on documenting bugs and building features.

  4. May 2022 — Aug 2022

    Durban, South Africa

    Advantage Learning Technologies

    Senior Software Engineer

    Laravel · MySQL · Redis · Vue 3 · TypeScript · Spring Boot · Angular

    • One of 4 developers enhancing an online Learning Management System.
    • Spearheaded the initial project structure enabling a seamless migration from webpack to Vite and then to Laravel 9, future-proofing the platform.
    • Created design documents and implemented modules alongside the team.
    • Maintained a legacy system for startup hubs in South Africa — new features, debugging, and deployments to test and production on Spring Boot and Angular.
    • Ensured server uptime and ran production issue monitoring.

  5. Oct 2021 — Apr 2022

    Vilnius, Lithuania

    Whatagraph

    Backend Software Engineer

    Laravel · MySQL

    • Integrated Twitter and Twitter Ads into the platform, cutting report bugs by 50% and improving data-analytics quality for clients.
    • Managed client technical support tickets, ensuring seamless integration of their data sources.
    • Improved in-house documentation on internal framework tooling and processes.

  6. Jan 2021 — Oct 2021

    United Kingdom

    Libryo

    Full Stack Engineer

    Laravel 7 · Vue.js · MySQL · GitLab · TypeScript · Playwright

    • Enhanced the core legal management system alongside a team of 10 developers.
    • Facilitated feature requests from the legal team, resulting in a friendlier application.
    • Implemented an internal scraping tool with TypeScript and Microsoft Playwright to extract constitutions and legislation.

  7. Apr 2020 — Dec 2020

    Nairobi, Kenya

    Ally Innovations

    Product Manager

    Flutter · Elixir · PostgreSQL · Jira · Bitbucket · Asana

    • Guided a team of 5 to deliver an MVP within a 3-month deadline, securing a further round of investment.
    • Presented to investors and pitched growth strategies for the company.
    • Facilitated strategy meetings, prioritising features and bugs for delivery.
    • Built the Storiez mobile app using Elixir and PostgreSQL.

03 Open source

Things I build in the open.

Table X

A fast, cross-platform database client for developers.

Pre-release · v0.2.0

Table X is an open-source SQL client for people who live in a query editor all day: a schema browser that survives large catalogs, an editable virtualised result grid, and a CodeMirror editor that knows your schema — on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android from one codebase.

The connection handling, wire-protocol decoding and streaming exports run in Rust; the editor and grid run in the webview, where the web platform is genuinely the best tool. The first design goal is correctness over convenience — a client that silently rounds a monetary value or updates more rows than you edited is worse than no client at all.

  • Five drivers. SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, SQL Server and ClickHouse — each with exact NUMERIC/DECIMAL decoding rather than floats.
  • Power features. SSH tunnels with multi-hop chains, visual EXPLAIN, ER diagrams, schema diff with generated migration DDL, notebooks, and result charts drawn in hand-written SVG.
  • Beyond the window. A tablex CLI sharing the same drivers — with diff --exit-code as a CI schema-drift gate — plus an MCP server so an agent can query read-only with row caps and a full audit trail.
  • Honest affordances. The UI hides what a given database cannot do instead of offering buttons that fail, and tells you which of four reasons made a result read-only.
View on GitHub
Table X result grid, showing an editable, filterable query result with row counts per table in the schema browser Result grid Table X new connection dialog for a ClickHouse database, with host, TLS, SSH tunnel and colour tag options New connection Table X appearance settings, showing eight built-in themes plus font and data-size controls Appearance

04 Skills

What I work with.

Backend

  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • Rust
  • Zend Framework
  • Yii
  • CodeIgniter
  • Node.js
  • Elixir
  • Spring Boot
  • C#
  • C++
  • REST APIs

Frontend

  • Vue 3
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Angular
  • AngularJS
  • Vite
  • Tailwind
  • WordPress

Mobile & desktop

  • Android (Java)
  • Flutter
  • Tauri
  • UWP

Data

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • Redis
  • MS SQL Server
  • ClickHouse
  • FileMaker

Infrastructure & practice

  • System architecture
  • CI/CD
  • Git
  • GitLab
  • Bitbucket
  • Linux (CentOS / RHEL)
  • Unit & feature testing
  • Playwright
  • SMPP
  • SOAP
  • SSL

Leadership

  • Engineering management
  • Executive-level management
  • Product management
  • Team leadership
  • Technical training
  • Client consulting

05 Education

Where it started.

  • 2011 — 2015

    Kenyatta University

    BSc, Software Engineering

  • 2013

    eMobilis Mobile Training Academy

    Certificate in Mobile Innovation and Telecommunication — Advanced MIT/Nokia Mobile Technology Entrepreneurship

Certifications

  • Mobile Innovation and Technology
  • Building an Android App with Architecture Components
  • FileMaker: Relational Database Design
  • Learning FileMaker
  • Digital Body Language

06 Contact

Got a system that needs untangling?

I take on consulting, systems integration and architecture work. The fastest way to reach me is email.

Email mwanikiphillip@gmail.com Phone +254 725 095 439 LinkedIn in/pmwaniki
Post P.O. Box 479-80109, Mtwapa