Charles Ongao
Engineering Team Lead at Wagewell
Nairobi County, Kenya
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCharles Ongao is an engineering team lead based in Nairobi with 11 years of experience building reliable, scalable Rails systems and leading small, high-impact teams. He excels at simplifying architectures—recently consolidating a Rails API + React stack into a performant Rails 8 monolith with Hotwire/Turbo—and balancing rapid feature delivery with zero-downtime operations using feature flags and CI/CD. Charles has a strong track record integrating payments, USSD, banking and HRIS systems to enable real-time financial services at scale, onboarding 1,000+ employees per month and processing sustained multimillion-KES transactions. He pairs hands-on engineering (upgrades from Rails 4→6, large-scale document migrations to S3) with product-facing collaboration, shaping roadmaps alongside founders and stakeholders. Known for mentoring and hiring, he also brings a pragmatic focus on test-driven practices and automation that cuts defects and support overhead. Off the resume, he describes himself with a playful edge—“a superhero with supervillain tendencies”—hinting at a bold, results-first approach to problem solving.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Software as a service using Ruby on Rails, Software as a service using Ruby on Rails at CourseraBachelor's degree, Bsc. Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Bsc. Computer Science at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
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Github Skills (66)
rspec-rails9
sketchup8
agile8
netsuite8
api8
geolocation8
test-coverage8
wikipedia8
heroku-deployment8
rspec8
api-client8
travis-ci8
capybara8
debugging8
mls7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
chalchuck/pesapal-gem
Jun 2015 - Mar 2019
Ruby gem to help you make authenticated calls with the Pesapal payment gateway API without the fuss! Works with Rails too.
Contributions:2 PRs, 1 branch, 2 comments in 3 years 9 months
api-gatewayruby-gemhotel-bookingadyenpaypal
chalchuck/africastalking
Aug 2016 - Sep 2019
Contributions:12 pushes, 1 branch, 2 tags in 3 years 1 month
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