HCMatrix

Problem

Growing companies need time tracking, leave management, payroll, recruitment, and performance in one place — not disconnected tools that drift out of sync.

Context

HCMatrix 3.0 launched in 2024 as Snapnet’s cloud HCM for African businesses — payroll, biometric time & attendance, employee self-service, recruitment, and performance. Adoption has grown to 10+ active company tenants and approximately 4k licensed employees (3.5k+) using self-service daily for leave, loans, reimbursement, requisitions, and related workflows. I took technical team lead in 2025 as write volume during payroll runs, attendance ingestion, and multi-tenant RBAC scaled.

Approach

• Split the platform into domain services — utility, payroll, time & attendance, recruitment, performance — each owning its data and deploy cycle.
• Used gRPC with a shared proto submodule for synchronous cross-service calls (company, employee, workflow data).
• Offloaded heavy payroll and notification work to RabbitMQ; used BullMQ workers for biometric attendance and break processing.
• Added Socket.IO on utility and recruitment for real-time updates during hiring workflows and live application chat.

Architecture

Outcome

Production HR platform in daily use across 10+ companies — approximately 4k licensed employees (3.5k+) on self-service for leave, loans, reimbursement, and requisitions, with biometric time & attendance and 1k+ employees paid through payroll each month. Twelve microservices span payroll, attendance, recruitment, performance, and notifications, deployable independently as tenant load grows.