Lawrence
Chiwaya

$ whoami

Running the rails behind a nation's money

$ cat experience.log

Experience

1. Senior Systems Engineer Team Lead

   Econet Wireless – Fintech Pvt Ltd · Sept 2019 – Present

   Promoted three times: Systems Support Analyst → Systems Engineer (2020) → Senior Systems Engineer / Team Lead (2023). Lead infrastructure strategy and SRE practice for Zimbabwe's largest mobile money platform.

   • Platform migration. Led the infrastructure workstream of a $20M+ core mobile money migration to Huawei (2025–26), including a full hardware refresh — doubled TPS and achieved zero downtime during cutover for 6M+ subscribers.
   • Leadership. Manage a team of 5 systems engineers, owning the infrastructure budget and roadmap for a platform processing millions of transactions monthly.
   • Hybrid cloud architecture. Designed and operate hybrid environments across Azure, AWS, VMware, Oracle VM and FusionSphere, sustaining 99.9% availability for mission-critical fintech services.
   • Automation & IaC. Cut server deployment time by 50% by codifying 1,000+ VMs with Terraform and Ansible; embedded an automation-first culture across the team.
   • Reliability engineering. Established SLO-driven monitoring and incident response practice — reduced P1 incidents by 80% and cut mean time to recovery from 4 hours to 1 hour.
   • Cost optimisation. Drove capacity right-sizing and licence consolidation across the virtual estate, saving 30% in annual infrastructure spend.
   • AIOps. Piloted AI-driven observability (Dynatrace, Splunk AI, VMware Aria) for anomaly detection and predictive alerting, reducing alert noise by 50%.
   • CI/CD. Built pipelines on Azure DevOps and GitLab CI that increased deployment velocity and reduced release-related downtime.
   • Earlier delivery. Led infrastructure for a $5M+ platform modernisation (2019–20), doubling capacity with zero-downtime cutover; migrated 500+ users from on-prem Exchange to Office 365.

2. Data Centre Systems Administrator Graduate Trainee

   Twenty Third Century Systems · Nov 2018 – Aug 2019

   Enterprise data centre operations for a leading regional IT solutions provider.

   • Expansion. Delivered a $3M+ data centre expansion, increasing compute and storage capacity by 50% while halving power and rack utilisation.
   • Operations. Administered 1,000+ VMs across VMware, PowerVM and IBM SAN; migrated the estate from vSphere 5 to 6.5.
   • Automation & security. Automated routine sysadmin tasks with Ansible (−50% manual effort); rolled out 2FA and permission hardening, cutting security incidents by 30%.

$ terraform providers

Core skills

$ ls certifications/

Certifications

• Google Cloud Professional Cloud ArchitectGoogle Cloud
• Project Management Professional (PMP)PMI
• Microsoft Azure Administrator (AZ-104)Microsoft
• Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)Red Hat
• OCI 2024 Generative AI Certified ProfessionalOracle
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)CNCF
• ITIL Foundation · Scrum Foundation Professional · ISO 27001 AssociateFoundations

$ git remote -v

Portfolio & open source

• Ansible automation rolesgithub.com/Larrytait/ansible

$ cat education

Education

• Master's in Business Management and Information Technology (MBMIT)Catholic University of Zimbabwe · 2026
• Honours in Business Studies and Computer Science (HBSCT)University of Zimbabwe · 2018