Meet the Lipa Payments Development Team

Have you ever wondered who is responsible for creating the products and applications you rely on every day? In this week's blog, we will be introducing you to the individuals behind Lipa softPOS and Lipa Pay.

The Lipa Development team comprises of a fascinating and highly skilled group of full-stack developers and software engineers who work together to create cool products like the Lipa SoftPOS. This product enables individuals to accept payments on their smartphones using Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The team has also developed Lipa Pay, a payment application that allows users make payments using BLE.

A typical day in the life of the dev team starts with a “stand-up” meeting. During the “stand-up”, they discuss the product's components, and updates, always keeping the consumers' needs and desires in mind. The team then works collaboratively, with someone working on the front end and someone else on the back end, to implement new features or add new SDKs to the Lipa Pay and Lipa softPOS. They then test these features to ensure everything works correctly and make any necessary fixes.

The team's tech stack includes a variety of tools and technologies such as React and React Native, Redux, Kotlin, Node.JS, Figma, Azure DevOps, Spring Boot, Docker, K8S (EKS), Helm, Ambassador gateway API, Vault, Consul, and MongoDB.

The Lipa Development team members are not only exceptional at their jobs, but they are also pretty cool individuals outside of work.

Roger serves as both the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Lipa Payments, where he heads the development team and is a data scientist. He is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Roger relocated to South Africa during his childhood. Even at a young age, Roger demonstrated exceptional intelligence, brilliance, and determination, which earned him admission to Cape Academy, a math and science school in Cape Town. He then pursued his education at The University of Cape Town (UCT), where he obtained triple majors in Mathematical Statistics, Computer Science, and Finance.

Roger Bukuru is primarily responsible for the technical aspects of the Lipa Payments operation. He ensures that all technical components of the products are secure and functional.

When not working, Roger finds pleasure in watching sports and movies, as well as spending time outdoors to appreciate nature. He is an avid learner who never ceases to expand his knowledge beyond his work. He has a profound interest in psychology, philosophy, and history, which he actively pursues in his leisure time. Additionally, he takes pleasure in honing his French language skills.

Minenhle, our “Developer of Operations”, at Lipa Payments, he specializes in keeping things running smoothly and adding new features to the Lipa platform. He is a dedicated problem solver who enjoys tackling complex challenges and spends a great deal of time thinking about scaling and optimization. He values usability and believes that technology should be intuitive and user-friendly, built with people in mind. For him, learning and practicing new skills is a great motivator.

He enjoys activities like gaming especially Minecraft and Fortnite and occasionally a casual game of Poker.

Minenhle graduated from UCT with a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering with honours in Computer Science.

One project that stands out to him is the process of white-labeling SoftPOS, which involved working with a variety of new frameworks and concepts. Through this experience, he gained a deeper understanding of SoftPOS and was able to develop an efficient white-labeling process.

Overall, he believes that technology should improve people's lives by making things easier and more accessible, rather than creating unnecessary complications.

Tonderai, our “Engineer of Software”,  is originally from Zimbabwe but has been in South Africa for 15 years. He has always been a curious person who likes to understand how things function and work. He is particularly interested in problem-solving, and that is what drove him to study engineering. He believes that software development is all about logic, he particularly enjoys software because there are no emotions involved and everything works because of logic.

In his free time, he enjoys listening to music, especially classical music, as he finds it
beautiful how sound can be used to convey messages that are difficult to articulate with words. He is also interested in politics because it helps him to understand how the world around him functions.

He graduated from UCT with a BSc Eng in Mechatronics with Honours.

At Lipa, he is particularly proud of the work he did on the BLE SDK, because it allowed him to open up a black-box, and get to play around with the intricacies that made the SDK function. He made several improvements to the SDK and he was also responsible for documenting it.

Ntuthuko, our InfoSec Engineer, is a driven and dedicated individual with a strong passion for utilizing technology to improve people's lives. His expertise encompasses both hardware and software, and he takes great pleasure in experimenting and tinkering to expand his knowledge. Ntuthuko is particularly drawn to addressing significant global issues, such as education and cybersecurity, through problem-solving.

His extensive skillset includes web development for both frontend and backend/server-side, DevOps, mobile development, IoT development, and desktop development. Recently, Ntuthuko has focused his efforts on payment security, which involves developing secure software, maintaining it, and safeguarding the resources and environment involved.

Ntuthuko graduated from UCT with a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

During his leisure time, Ntuthuko indulges in various hobbies, including watching sci-fi series, reading, painting, listening to music and podcasts, and playing board games.

One of his proudest accomplishments at Lipa Payments was developing the Saas layer code, which allows for the creation of individual merchant accounts with their isolated resources and data.

If you're interested in exploring the work of our developers in greater detail, you can either browse through our documentation or request access to our SDKs. However, if you're wanting to get more information about our products, we'd be happy to schedule a discussion with you and provide a demonstration. You can also test our products here.