About
Backend engineer. Distributed systems and reliability.
My work spans fintech, travel, commerce, and HR, but the through-line is money-movement, where the failure modes are expensive: a duplicated charge, a repayment that never lands, an audit trail that disagrees with itself. Those do not show up under "it usually works," so most of my effort goes into the paths that only happen under load, retries, and duplicate callbacks.
In practice that is a few habits. The lifecycle is an explicit state machine, so illegal states cannot be represented. History lives in an append-only log, so past states are events I can read back rather than values I overwrote. Operations are idempotent, so a retry or a duplicate callback settles once. The Vida recovery engine is that under real financial stakes. The Job Hunt CRM is the same approach in code you can read end to end.
I came to this from law. I did an LLB before moving into backend work full time, and the habit that carried over is looking for the edge case that bites later. That is most of what reliability work is.
Experience
- Backend Engineer · VeendHQ (Vida AI) Primary backend engineer on Vida, an embedded lending and BNPL platform I built and run end to end: loan origination, KYC and AML, a configurable credit-decisioning rules engine, disbursement, direct-debit mandate management, and the loan-recovery engine. Also built an AI credit-risk service that turns credit-bureau and bank-statement data into risk assessments. The recovery engine is written up as a case study. Mar 2024 to present
- Backend Lead (Contract) · Sellyt Multi-vendor commerce SaaS. As lead backend engineer through its second phase, built the subscription billing engine (plan lifecycle, trials, upgrades, Stripe and Paystack webhooks) and the omnichannel messaging platform across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, including the Meta 24-hour messaging-window rules. 2025 to 2026
- Backend Lead (Contract) · Rayonner Travel-booking backend for flights, hotels, cars and activities. Built a multi-tier caching layer over slow supplier APIs, a cross-currency pricing engine, and a payment-first booking flow with guest checkout. 2024 to 2025
- Backend Engineer · Juiceme Built core modules of a multi-country HR and payroll platform (NestJS): leave management, organization onboarding with org-scoped multi-tenancy, employee management, and payroll. Sep 2023 to Jun 2024
- Software Engineer · Enyata Built backend for production client products in TypeScript, Express and Postgres. On Stitchouse, a fashion marketplace, I built the product catalog, Elasticsearch-backed search with a sync-and-async indexing pipeline, orders and delivery, and the custom-manufacturing quotation system. On Creatr, a creator platform, I built the media-kit domain (multi-platform rate cards, connected social accounts) and the access-control system. Also contributed to Sojorne, a care-coordination platform. Jul 2022 to Jun 2023
Tools
Things I have shipped production systems on.
Core. TypeScript and Node, NestJS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis.
Async and scale. BullMQ, event-driven services, multi-tier caching, webhooks.
Also. Python and Flask, Elasticsearch, Docker, AWS, CI/CD.