Nicholas Mutale
Nicholas Mutale

Full-Stack Engineer

Actively looking · Member since 8 Sep 2026
Message
Location
Livingstone, Zambia
Desired salary
Confidential
Work preference
Remote Only / Full Time, Part Time, Contract, Freelance, Volunteer, Internship, Temporary
Experience level
Senior

About

Professional summary

I am a Full-Stack Engineer with more than four years of production experience building, modernizing, and scaling Ruby on Rails applications across public sector, healthcare, and fintech environments.

I specialize in backend architecture, API development, legacy system modernization, database performance tuning, secure authentication, and deployment automation. I have led high-stakes Ruby and Rails upgrades on live systems while maintaining zero downtime.

I build reliable healthcare and platform services using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, REST APIs, JWT authentication, role-based authorization, background jobs, and comprehensive automated testing. I am experienced in designing service objects that keep complex business logic maintainable and testable.

I have hands-on DevOps experience with Capistrano, Passenger/Nginx, Docker, rbenv, private gem registries, monitoring, and production incident resolution. My work has delivered measurable results including query performance improvements and significant reductions in operational toil.

I also enjoy mentoring developers in Ruby on Rails and React, with an emphasis on clean code, sound architectural decisions, code reviews, and production readiness.

I am available for remote full-time or contract engagements where I can contribute to secure, scalable, high-availability web products.

Notice period: 1 week

Skills

38 capabilities

Tech stack & tools

Working toolkit

Experience

Career history

Backend Engineer Confidential Public Sector Client

Led a zero-downtime upgrade of a live multi-subsite CMS from Ruby on Rails 5.2 to 7.2 and Ruby 2.6 to 3.2. Resolved compatibility issues involving Zeitwerk autoloading, YAML alias deprecations, and ActionController::Parameters serialization changes.

Designed independent Capistrano 3 deployment pipelines for staging and production environments, including rbenv, ed25519 SSH keys, bastion-host proxy configuration, and the Sprockets 4 manifest migration. Migrated proprietary CMS gems to Gemfury and updated Bundler authentication pipelines.

Built scheduled publishing automation using a ScheduledProductPublisher service, Whenever cron jobs, and Capistrano hooks. Resolved production incidents, created verification scripts and response playbooks that reduced operational toil by 70%, improved admin query performance by more than 20%, and implemented Sentry and New Relic monitoring.

Backend Engineer Bluemify

Contracted to build backend infrastructure for a live healthcare platform that connects patients and doctors for in-person, home-based, and virtual consultations. Architected radiology and ultrasound workflows with validated state transitions, image upload services, and supporting models.

Built service objects for home-based care linking, integrated Cloudinary with ActiveStorage for doctor contract storage, and diagnosed a StringIO issue that caused silent empty uploads. Implemented Zoom API integration for virtual consultation creation with test-friendly mock fallbacks.

Developed the Patient Dashboard API for profile management, bookings, payment history, appointment reminders, and Prawn-generated invoices. Hardened authentication with rate limiting, JWT expiry and refresh flows, API-key validation, Pundit authorization, and OTP/2FA, while standardizing API datetime serialization to UTC ISO8601.

Software Developer Mentor Microverse

Mentored more than 10 full-stack developers in Ruby on Rails and React.

Guided developers on code quality, architectural design, production readiness, and practical full-stack development practices.

Education

Learning history

Microverse

Full Stack Web Development Program, Full Stack Web Development

Completed more than 1,300 hours of intensive programming education covering algorithms, data structures, and full-stack web development. Obtained certificates in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. Developed remote collaboration skills through GitHub, git-flow, and daily standups.

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