About

I'm Leon Magara. I'm a data analyst and software engineer, and I've spent the last five years building data systems that help people make better decisions.

That journey started in South Africa. In 2017, I was a summer associate at Phakamo Technologies in Centurion, running cybersecurity audits and system migrations for the Gauteng Infrastructure Finance Agency. It was my first real exposure to what happens when legacy systems meet modern requirements, and the mess that creates when nobody's maintaining the data underneath.

After my time in South Africa, I moved to New York for university and graduated from St. John's with a Computer Science degree in 2020. During that time, I interned at Boost Payment Solutions in Manhattan, where I cleaned and prepared customer data for a full CRM migration to Salesforce. That project taught me something I carry into every job since: even the best systems fail with bad data. Getting the data right before it goes in is the work that makes everything else possible.

After graduation, I joined Orion Fleet Intelligence in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. For two years, I built the SQL analytical layer behind their fleet telematics reporting — driver behavior scoring, mileage analysis, diagnostics summaries, insurance risk profiles. The work generated over $100,000 in cumulative insurance savings for clients like Cover Whale. I also built self-service reporting tools that cut 10+ hours per week of internal analyst workload. That role taught me how powerful clean, transparent data is when it's connected to business outcomes.

From there, I went remote with EOS Group in Dallas. I developed stored procedures and dashboards that fed real-time project viability data to decision-makers across construction projects for clients like First Energy and Eversource. I built a compliance architecture from scratch that was later adopted by multiple clients. And I authored the documentation that let both technical and non-technical teams actually use what I built.

In April 2024, I came home to Zimbabwe. I joined InterConsult, my father's engineering consultancy in Harare, where I now serve as Data Analyst and AI Software Engineer. Here, I've been leading forensic financial reconciliation for two SADC-GMI transboundary groundwater projects worth a combined $434,000 — extracting 78+ reimbursable line items, reconciling 13 invoice sources across five international experts, and verifying every payment against bank statements. I also designed and am building the Timber Center IMS: an 88-table SQL Server retail management system with a PyQt5 desktop interface, point-of-sale, multi-currency support, barcode scanning, double-entry accounting, and eight analytics report types. It's built for a cash-based economy with intermittent connectivity — because that's the reality of where I work.

This fall, I'm heading to the University of Texas at San Antonio for my Master's in Data Analytics. But the direction is set. I'm building technology that advances quality of life in developing economies. That's the work I care about, and it's the work I plan to keep doing.