How I learned to build things that hold.

Building for clients

The story starts at a design studio. As CTO of UltiDesigns I ran the technical side, building web apps and intranets for our corporate clients.

The work didn't stop at the code. I also worked on social media marketing and brand strategy, which meant the software I built had to make sense to people who would never read a line of it.

Learning the whole stack

In 2017 I joined Telvida, a telecoms company in Lagos. The work spanned the whole stack, so I learned the whole stack.

Over nearly three years I co-built and maintained the company's ERP system and built its Cooperative Management System. I built Telvida Spark, a marketplace for sending media and ads to digital signage screens remotely. I wrote the backend API for the Telvida Room Automation app and oversaw its mobile apps.

Underneath all of that sat the parts nobody sees. I built our telephony systems on Asterisk. I provisioned and virtualized the servers, managed the Linux machines everything ran on, and wrote the automations that kept it all ticking.

Offices, screens, phones and rooms: by the time I left I had written software for all of them, and learned that a system is only finished when other people can depend on it.

When the software moves money

At Tangerine Africa the stakes changed. The services I built held people's money and their insurance, and I built them alongside product managers and designers rather than handing code over at the end.

I led a team of five backend engineers on the banking vertical and architected the microservices system behind its retail and business banking services. In front of it I built a custom API gateway to manage access: one front door for a growing number of services.

Business transactions on that platform reached ₦5 billion a month.

The same problem, at more requests per second

Next came a remote contract with Africa Fintech, where I led the backend team and architected the microservices system for retail and business banking.

I built another custom API gateway, this one serving thousands of requests per second. To make it simpler for services to talk to each other, I wrote an Express-style gRPC server library, so defining an internal endpoint felt as familiar as writing a web route.

Leading the product, not just the code

At 9jaPay I led the backend team again, architecting the microservices system for both retail and business banking.

This time the job reached past the code. As Staff Backend Engineer I also ran technical product management across both verticals, deciding what to build as much as how to build it.

From platform to AI, in healthcare

I joined League in 2022 as a Senior Software Engineer in platform engineering, working on the foundations the rest of the product is built on.

From there I moved into AI. Today I build the AI and platform tools behind League's next generation of healthcare agents, which reach more than 30 million people around the world.