HCMatrix

Problem

Growing companies need time tracking, leave management, payroll, recruitment, and performance in one place. Separate tools drift out of sync.

Context

HCMatrix 3.0 launched in 2024 as Snapnet’s cloud HCM for African businesses. It covers 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+) use 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.