About

Hi, I’m Dzenyu Samuel Mukangara — a Principal Software Engineer who thrives on turning complex requirements into simple, resilient, and maintainable systems. Over the years, I’ve built a career at the intersection of architecture, hands-on coding, and engineering leadership, helping teams ship reliable software at scale.

Principal Software Engineer | Java & Spring | Kafka & Event-Driven Systems | AWS Cloud | Platform & Team Builder
Helping teams deliver resilient, high-throughput microservices with clarity, reliability, and scale.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 A Little About Me

Outside of technology, I’m first and foremost a husband and proud dad of two amazing kids. Family is at the heart of everything I do — whether it’s cheering my kids on in their adventures, enjoying movie nights, or exploring the world together.

Travel has been one of our favorite ways to connect as a family. We’ve made memories in Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, Qatar, Dubai, the UK, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and more — always returning to our home base in DFW, Texas.

When it’s time to recharge, I turn to music. My playlists are a mix of Afrobeat, Country, Gospel, Reggae, RnB, Soul, Sungura — sounds that keep me energized, inspired, and grounded.

💻 What I Do

• Architecture & Delivery → data-intensive services (batch + streaming)
• Backend Development → Java/Spring microservices with pragmatic DevOps on AWS
• Event-Driven Design → Kafka (streams, schema management, state stores)
• API Design → RESTful APIs and Federated GraphQL schemas
• Payments & Billing Systems → integrate payment gateways and SaaS billing platforms (Braintree, Stripe, Recurly, BillDesk/UPI)
• Subscription Lifecycle Design → reliable subscription management and billing flows
• Webhook Ingestion → robust event handling and reconciliation
• System Hardening → observability, reliability, and cost-aware scaling
• Leadership & Mentorship → growing high-performing engineering teams

🎯 Current Focus

• Advanced stream processing with Kafka Streams & RocksDB performance tuning
• Event-sourcing and transactional outbox patterns for consistency
• Cloud cost guardrails → right-sizing, autoscaling, and efficient data layout
• Developer experience → golden paths, starter templates, and code quality tooling

🚀 Highlights

• Database Tooling → Delivered cross-platform admin utilities adopted by DBAs worldwide (Embarcadero/Idera).
• Media Metadata Distribution → Built large-scale playlist and EPG pipelines (TiVo Corp.).
• Hybrid AWS Migrations → Designed fault-tolerant services across on-prem and AWS (S3, EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache).
• Payments & Subscriptions → Integrated with Braintree, Stripe, Recurly, BillDesk (UPI), and in-app purchase workflows.
• Batch & Data Pipelines → Built resilient workflows with Spring Batch, AWS Batch, and AWS DMS.
• Commerce Migrations → led the migration of Chegg’s commerce stack to a SaaS billing vendor (Recurly); reduced ops overhead and improved reconciliation processes — see the case study.

✍️ Speaking & Writing

I share practical insights on architecture, Java/Spring practices, and platform engineering.
Topics often include:

• Testing strategies that scale
• Migration playbooks
• Production debugging techniques

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🛠 Tech Stack (abridged)

• Core Java & Algorithms → concurrency, memory management, and efficient data IO
• Distributed Systems → 7+ years designing & operating high-scale distributed systems
• Performance Optimization → eliminating bottlenecks, optimizing data flow
• Cloud & DevOps → AWS (ECS, Lambda, MSK, S3, RDS, Batch, SQS, SNS), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Observability & Ops → Splunk, NewRelic, Cortex; CI/CD best practices
• Architectural Expertise → Microservices, Event-Driven Systems, API Design, Platform Engineering
• Other Interests → Graph DBs (Neo4j, Dgraph), AI tools (Cursor AI, Gemini, ChatGPT)

🧭 How I Work

• Bias for clarity → simple designs, small PRs, production-first mindset
• Pragmatic quality → meaningful tests, guardrails over gatekeeping
• Operational empathy → logs/metrics/traces by default; SLOs guide design
• Collaborative leadership → unblock fast, mentor often, document always

🤝 Mentorship

I enjoy coaching engineers on system design, testing, and platform fundamentals.
If you’re looking to level up your team, bootstrap a new service, or improve platform reliability, I’m glad to help.

📬 Contact

If you’re tackling challenges around data, scale, or reliability—and need a clear path to production—let’s talk.
You can reach me on LinkedIn.