Work

What I've built, and the thinking behind it.

I’ve been building software professionally since 2013, first in Lagos, then in Berlin. I mainly work on backend and distributed systems using Java, Spring Boot, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Kafka and AWS.

Selected work

Making the reviews read path fast

The reviews platform at GetYourGuide serves around 360 million requests a day across 30 million reviews and 200,000+ activities. The read queries involved 23 joins, with p99 latency of 140ms and high database infrastructure costs.

I led a redesign around denormalised, read-optimised PostgreSQL tables. We separated aggregation workloads from review-list retrieval, removed caches used to compensate for complex queries, and moved to selective column projection with offset pagination and a limit-plus-one look-ahead.

p99 latency dropped from 140ms to 30ms. Simpler queries allowed us to scale down the database infrastructure, reducing direct monthly database costs by a factor of 30.

Moving user-generated content off the monolith

I led the migration of the user-generated-content platform from a PHP monolith to Java and Spring Boot microservices on PostgreSQL and Kafka. I owned the migration architecture, data modelling, ETL, service implementation and cross-team rollout.

Development velocity improved by 15% and time to market came down by 10%. We also started publishing Kafka domain events when activity-level review statistics changed, so other services could receive updates without requesting the data directly.

Photos in reviews

We added customer photo uploads to reviews with automated image moderation.

We shipped it in three months with Amazon Rekognition doing automated image moderation. Customers uploaded 250,000+ photos at a 92% automated pass rate, which contributed to a 12% cart-conversion uplift and a 2% overall conversion increase in the first quarter.

Changing how reviews are ranked

I worked with product and data teams to improve how reviews were ranked. I proposed a change to the ranking algorithm and led it from hypothesis to production rollout. It contributed a 2.51% global conversion-rate uplift.

The record

Senior Software Engineer

2019 — Present

GetYourGuide — Berlin

  • Currently in the Catalog team. Previously Reviews, where I owned the domain, alongside the Activity Detail Page and Booking Assistant.
  • Owned architecture and technical strategy for a reviews platform serving 360 million requests a day across 30 million reviews and 200,000+ activities.
  • Designed an LLM pipeline for AI-generated review summaries, snippets and tags, supporting product use cases across two teams.
  • Run architecture and design reviews across four engineering teams, aligning shared services and upstream consumers on rollout decisions.
  • Coach and mentor the engineers on my team, including building the case for a promotion from L5C to L5B.
  • Incident commander during a reader-instance connection-pool saturation; regular on-call, postmortems, capacity planning and production-readiness reviews with Datadog.

Senior Software Engineer

2017 — 2019

Andela

  • Standardised microservice architecture around domain-driven design, increasing engineering productivity by 50%.
  • Built distributed backend services on Node.js, PostgreSQL, Pub/Sub, Docker, Kubernetes and Elasticsearch.
  • Built an automated reporting platform that analysed 75,000 code snippets at 94% moderation accuracy, improving client satisfaction by 28%.
  • Cut API latency by 45% with Redis caching in a high-traffic microservice, and started a recurring engineering talk series across teams.

Software Engineer / Team Lead

2015 — 2017

Softcom — Lagos

  • Built backend APIs for the retailer engagement and communications platforms MTN used to support distributed retailers across Nigeria.
  • Built APIs and ETL pipelines for a government learning platform, including monthly payment analysis for 200,000+ volunteers.
  • Built an internal request-management platform that cut request resolution time by 40%.

Software Engineer

2013 — 2015

Cedarview Communications and Iconway — Lagos

  • Built enterprise systems for asset and inventory management, visitor management and regulatory reporting.
  • Built an ATM inverter and battery-monitoring platform that integrated hardware telemetry with backend software.

Education