Fredrick Mandela

Experience

A deeper look at my professional experience

Beyond the resume summary: the systems I have owned, the teams I have supported, and the kind of engineering problems I have worked on.

Most recent role

One Acre Fund

Data Engineering Manager / Lead Data Engineer

January 2021 – March 2026 · Nairobi, Kenya

At One Acre Fund, I led data engineering work across multi-country operations, combining hands-on engineering with team leadership, stakeholder engagement, platform ownership, and delivery management. My work focused on building reliable data pipelines, improving data quality, enabling analytics, and supporting operational systems that teams depended on for reporting and decision-making.

Team leadership

Leadership scope

Data platforms

Primary focus

Full-stack engineering

Technical range

8+ years

Experience

Areas of ownership

My role covered both platform-level engineering and people leadership. I worked across the full data lifecycle, from source system integration to warehouse modeling, quality checks, analytics enablement, and stakeholder-facing delivery.

Data platform ownership

Led the development and operation of data platforms supporting ingestion, transformation, reporting, and analytics across multi-country operations.

Pipeline reliability and orchestration

Built and managed batch pipelines, workflow orchestration, monitoring, and alerting practices using tools such as Airflow, Dataiku, dbt, and Snowflake.

Analytics enablement

Partnered with business and analytics teams to convert operational data into trusted datasets, dashboards, and reporting layers for decision-making.

Data quality and governance

Implemented data quality checks, documentation practices, access controls, and governance processes to improve trust and reliability.

Technical leadership

Managed and mentored data engineers, supported prioritization, reviewed technical approaches, and translated business needs into engineering delivery.

Selected achievements

Led data engineering work supporting operations across multiple countries and business functions.

Helped scale data infrastructure from fragmented reporting workflows toward centralized, trusted data platforms.

Delivered and supported pipelines for key operational systems including Fineract, Odoo, KoboToolbox, SAP, Jira, FieldPro, and other source systems.

Supported large-scale data migration work involving client, loan, repayment, group, and order data across legacy and target systems.

Implemented data quality and monitoring practices using Soda, Airflow alerts, and Slack notifications to improve visibility into data issues.

Managed a small data engineering team while remaining hands-on across architecture, SQL, Python, pipeline design, and stakeholder communication.