Kashif Mir Mazer Ali
I am the Lead Data Architect at Bboxx and I own the enterprise data platform that runs across our African markets.
My role is to make sure the data underneath the business is reliable, consistent and ready for the people who depend on it every day. The country managing directors, the senior leadership team and the CTO all use this platform to make the decisions that run our operations, and my job is to keep that foundation working at the scale our business needs.
Most of what I do connects back to one question. Can the right person see the right number at the right time to make the right call? When the answer is yes, the business moves. When it is not, we fix it. The reason this work matters to me is what sits on the other end of it. I have travelled to Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal across this work and have seen what reliable power means in the lives of children doing their homework after dark and families running a small business from home. The data platform is what makes that reach measurable and improvable, and that is what keeps me in it.
One of the most defining pieces of work I have led at Bboxx was the integration that followed our acquisition of PEG Africa. I came across as part of that acquisition and I was the engineer chosen to design and deliver the full integration of both companies’ data and financial systems. The work brought roughly one hundred thousand PEG customers across four West African markets onto the Bboxx platform alongside our existing base, and built the technical backbone that allowed Bboxx to collect payments, close the books and recognise the value of the acquisition. There was no off the shelf solution for what we needed. I designed the architecture from scratch and shipped it.
The other piece of work I am proud of is leading the data framework behind our move from Pulse 1.0 to Pulse 2.0. Underneath the change, the data was stored in a completely different shape, and every dashboard the business runs on was reading from the old shape. On switchover day they would all stop working unless someone rebuilt them in time. I led that rebuild and ran the switchover myself for the first two markets, and the approach I set was then used as Pulse 2.0 rolled out to the rest of our countries. It is one of those pieces of work where if it goes right, nobody notices, because the business carries on running. That is the bar for the data platform we run.
What I have most enjoyed at Bboxx is being trusted with real ownership. I lead the data team across our African and UK offices, I make the architectural decisions, and I am accountable for the platform as a whole. That kind of trust is rare. It comes with weight, but it also lets you do your best work. The company backs the people it believes in and gives them room to lead, and that is what has made the role what it is.
What it takes to do well here is straightforward. You have to care about the cause, you have to take real ownership of your area without waiting to be told, and you have to be comfortable making the call when nobody else can. The pace is fast, the work is hard, and the people who do best are the ones who run toward the problem rather than away from it. That mindset is what makes the company work, and it is what makes the work worth doing.