Dzenyu Mukangara

Principal Engineer, Engineering Leadership, Micro Services, Cloud (AWS), Mentoring, AI

Hi, I’m Dzenyu Samuel Mukangara — a Principal Engineer who enjoys turning complex requirements into simple, maintainable systems. I work across architecture, hands-on coding, and engineering leadership to help teams ship reliable software at scale.

A Little About Me

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

Travel is one of our favorite ways to connect as a family. We’ve created lasting memories in the Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, UK, Zambia, Zimbabwe and more, with our home base in DFW, Texas.

When I’m not building systems or spending time with my family, you’ll often find me listening to music. My playlists are usually a mix of Afrobeat, Gospel, RnB, Sungura, and Reggae — music that keeps me energized, inspired, and grounded.

What I do

  • Architecture and delivery for data-intensive services (batch + streaming)
  • Java/Spring microservices with pragmatic DevOps on AWS
  • Event-driven design with Kafka (streams, schema, state stores)
  • System hardening: observability, reliability, and cost-aware scaling
  • Mentoring and building high-performing engineering teams

Current focus

  • Stream processing patterns with Kafka Streams and RocksDB performance tuning
  • Event-sourcing and transactional outbox for consistency
  • Cloud cost guardrails (right-sizing, autoscaling, data layout)
  • Developer experience: golden paths, templates, and code quality tooling

Highlights

  • Database tooling: Delivered cross-platform admin utilities used by DBAs worldwide (Embarcadero/Idera).
  • Media metadata distribution: Built large-scale playlist and EPG pipelines (TiVo Corp.).
  • Hybrid AWS: Led migrations and built fault-tolerant services across on‑prem and AWS (S3, EC2, DynamoDB, ElastiCache).
  • Payments and subscriptions: Integrated Braintree, Stripe, Recurly, BillDesk (UPI), and in‑app purchase workflows.
  • Batch and data pipelines: Spring Batch, AWS Batch, AWS DMS for resilient movement and transformation.

Speaking & writing

  • I share practical notes on architecture, Java/Spring practices, and platform thinking.
  • Popular topics: testing strategies, migration playbooks, and production debugging.
  • Explore by taxonomy:

Tech stack (abridged)

  • Core Java & Algorithms: Extensive experience with Java concurrency, memory management, and data IO.
  • Distributed Systems: 7+ years of experience designing, building, and operating high-scale distributed systems.
  • Performance Optimization: Expertise in identifying and eliminating bottlenecks, improving data flow, and optimizing performance.
  • Cloud & DevOps: Highly proficient in AWS (ECS, Lambda, MKS, S3, RDS, Batch, SQS, SNS), Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD practices (Terraform) to ensure operational excellence (Splunk, Newrelic, Cortex).
  • Architectural Expertise: Microservices, Event-Driven Systems, Scalable Distributed Systems, API Design, Platform Engineering.
  • Other Proficiencies: Graph DB (Neo4j, Dgraph), AI (Cursor AI, Gemini, ChatGPT).

How I work

  • Bias for clarity: simple designs, small PRs, and production-first thinking
  • Pragmatic quality: tests that matter, guardrails over gatekeeping
  • Operational empathy: logs/metrics/traces by default; SLOs guide design
  • Collaborative leadership: unblock fast, mentor often, write it down

Mentorship

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

Contact

If you have a problem that involves data, scale, or reliability—and needs a clear path to production—let’s talk. Find me on LinkedIn.