About
I build engineering teams and products from zero to one. Not as a consultant who advises from the outside — as the person who writes the first line of code, makes the first engineering hire, and is accountable when it ships or doesn't.
I've done this in fintech, retail-tech, and AI. In Lagos and in Helsinki. At startups where the infrastructure was hostile and the stakes were real. The work: - NPL ratios cut from 90% to 50% - Revenue systems built from zero to €120K/qtr - Teams scaled from one to 30+ engineers
That's the work — not case studies, but scars and systems.
The combination that's genuinely rare: IC depth, EM experience, and 0-to-1 founder instinct in the same person. I know the cost of shipping in production — not from reading about it, but from writing the code that shipped or didn't. Everything I write comes from that accountability.
Ventures
Founder
QuantaBridge Labs
AI strategy and production engineering. I work with fintech and retail companies on the hard part: getting from "we want to use AI" to "it ships in production and solves real money problems." Architecture, implementation, team enablement.
quantabridgelabs.com
Founder
RetailLoop
A platform that connects POS, ecommerce, and inventory into one live feed. So retail teams see what's happening now, not what happened last week. No waiting for reports. No missed signals.
retailloop.co
Career
Team Lead, Payroll and Personal Banking
Zedcrest Capital Limited
May 2025 – Present
Lagos, Nigeria
- →Rebuilt delivery confidence across a 5–10 person team after a period of org dysfunction
- →Driving 24% company revenue increase by chairing a digital transformation project
- →Cut NPL rate from 90% to 50% (44-point improvement) via automated loan decision engine on ~$30K/month loan volume
- →Migrated background job processing from RabbitMQ to Temporal — durable execution, deterministic retries, full observability
- →Phased live migration of production infrastructure with zero service disruption
- →Improved p95 latency by 60% on migrated services
Engineering Lead
RetailLoop
July 2022 – June 2025
Helsinki, Finland
- →Founded and scaled engineering org 0 → 20 engineers — career ladders, hiring rubrics, technical strategy from scratch
- →$500K+ in operational savings via digitisation of manual workflows across 300+ SMBs
- →99.9% uptime on core transaction paths via multi-tenant real-time event pipeline (4,000+ events/day, ~1,500 merchants)
- →Instituted quarterly architecture reviews, written ADRs, 15–25% budget ring-fenced for tech debt each quarter
- →Built AI signals platform preventing €120K/quarter in overstock losses for retail operators
Engineering Lead, Non-Core Banking
9jaPay (New African Fintech Limited)
April 2024 – April 2025
Lagos, Nigeria
- →Reduced onboarding drop-off 15%+ by redesigning KYB workflow
- →Increased user acquisition 18% via end-to-end referral system with tracking, attribution, and rewards
- →Cut server response times 30% and reduced cloud costs via platform-wide backend profiling
- →Built custom API Gateway (Node.js, Restana, Fast-Gateway) as single secure entry point across distributed microservices
- →Consolidated four identity verification microservices into unified KYC system with NIN validation
- →Reduced financial statement generation from hours to minutes using Node.js streams and pipelines
- →Built Fastify-based flight aggregation backend (search, booking, payment in one flow)
Senior Backend Developer
Slide
Feb 2023 – March 2024
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- →Designed Kafka-based event ingestion pipeline (4,000 events/day) with local caching on PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis
- →Built resilient integrations with external POS and commerce platforms
- →Eliminated manual intervention in external order capture flows via APIs, webhooks, and automated state-update handlers
- →Built shared decision engines powering abandoned-cart reminders, promotional offers, and campaign targeting
- →Standardised CI/CD pipelines across staging and production (Jenkins, containerised environments)
- →70% reduction in deployment failures via domain microservices decomposition (payments, logistics, accounts, integrations)
Senior Backend Developer
Terragon
Feb 2021 – March 2023
Lagos, Nigeria
- →Built Terragon Prime from scratch — microservices platform for USSD/SMS campaign management and telco subscriber data, serving multiple telco clients and millions of subscribers
- →Maintained Java-based data collection and alerting pipeline integrated with Kafka and Jasmin gateway (~500 SMS alerts/day per client)
- →Built Python Flask + Twisted backend abstracting Jasmin's API into a management interface, cutting operational workload by half
- →Designed Elasticsearch-backed analytics dashboards for USSD/SMS campaign performance across millions of records per client
Senior Backend Developer
Retailar
Feb 2019 – March 2021
Lagos, Nigeria
- →Led 5-engineer team through end-to-end planning, delivery, and production rollout — shipped MVP of all core products in 3 months
- →Built credit-scoring engine that reduced loan defaulters by 20%
- →Built USSD application for offline users — drove 20% month-over-month adoption growth from previously unreachable users
- →Implemented circuit breaker pattern across all external loan provider integrations
- →Led monolith decomposition into 3 loosely coupled services
- →Authored a patch for the official Sails-PostgreSQL adapter (TLS backward compatibility for Azure PostgreSQL migrations)
Backend Developer
FieldInsight
Jan 2018 – Feb 2019
Lagos, Nigeria
- →Built Node.js/MongoDB backend dynamically generating forms for 15,000+ active field staff
- →Increased automated test coverage from 30% to 70%+ on legacy codebase
- →Implemented Redis read-through cache layer on legacy production system
- →Built batch processing service (Celery + RabbitMQ) automating weekly large-scale reporting across 1TB+ datasets
Volunteer Mentor
Formation Dev
2022 – Present
Remote
- →60+ engineers placed at Meta, Netflix, LinkedIn, Grafana Labs, Asana, Chime, and other Series A+ companies
- →135+ technical mentoring sessions, 4.7/5 average rating
- →Socratic coaching approach — system design (junior to senior), algorithms and data structures
BSc Computer Science
University of Lagos
December 2017
Lagos, Nigeria
Speaking
I speak on the things I've actually done — not frameworks, but the decisions that shipped or didn't. Topics I know from the inside:
- →Building engineering teams from zero to one
- →AI adoption in fintech and retail
- →IC to engineering manager transitions
- →Fintech engineering in emerging markets
- →Data engineering and pipeline architecture
- →Engineering leadership in high-growth startups
- →African tech infrastructure and production lessons
- →Hiring and scaling engineering teams
Invite me to speak
I speak on what I've shipped, not what I've read. Tell me about the event — scope, audience, outcomes you care about. I'll say yes if it's a fit. You'll hear from me within a week.
Recognition
“Olusola is a model professional. A definite plus on any team. Being privileged to work with him in multiple capacities and companies has been a great experience. He always sees the big picture, calls out potential bottlenecks way before they happen, and always takes ownership of tasks and features from ideation to execution. A textbook definition of a 10x developer. His positivity makes him a great team player and he is always loved by his peers, colleagues, direct reports, and even managers. His unique blend of empathy, expertise, and excellence makes him an invaluable asset to every organisation. I will definitely recommend him for any engineering position.”
“Olusola had the biggest impact this week by giving actionable, targeted feedback that shifted my system-design approaches. He pushed me beyond a DB-centric mindset and into asynchronous patterns, told me about separating data types and picking fit-for-purpose storage, and followed up with examples and things I could look up to practice after the session.”