WorkVerification infrastructure
Angalia
KYC verification for Kenyan businesses: instant validation of National ID, KRA PIN and vehicle registration, exposed as a service others build onboarding on.
Stack as evidence
Laravel · MySQL · Redis · APIs
Concerns
Identity verification · Upstream integrations · API design · Rate limiting
Live
angalia.ke- 01
Verification request
From a customer’s onboarding flow
- 02
API
Authenticated, rate limited
- 03
Upstream registries
Outside our control
- 04
Result
Validated, cached, auditable
01The problem
Onboarding is only as fast as the slowest registry
Businesses need to verify a customer’s identity documents before they can serve them. The data lives in external registries with their own availability and response times, and every business was re-solving the same integration problem.
02The constraints
What could not simply be changed.
Upstream is a dependency, not a component
Registry behaviour cannot be changed, so the platform has to make it predictable for the businesses on top of it.
Sensitive by definition
Identity data demands careful handling of what is stored, for how long, and who can see it.
03The architecture
Angalia sits between a business’s onboarding flow and the registries. A single authenticated API accepts a verification request, routes it to the appropriate upstream integration, normalises the response and returns a consistent result. Rate limiting protects both the platform and the registries, and caching keeps repeated checks fast without becoming stale.
04Engineering decisions
01
One API over many registries
The value is uniformity. Customers integrate once and get a predictable contract regardless of which registry answers.
05The trade-offs
What complexity I introduced, on purpose.
- Abstracting registries hides their differences, which sometimes means presenting a simpler answer than the raw source gives.
06The outcome
- Businesses onboard customers quickly and securely without building registry integrations themselves.
07The lesson
When the hard dependency is external, the product is the layer that makes it dependable.