For Timothy Ogunwemimo, a senior DevOps engineer at the UK-based company Giacom, the true value of technology is often measured by what doesn’t happen: the system that doesn’t crash, the database that doesn’t lag, and the infrastructure that scales without a sound. What began as a technical curiosity in 2018, wondering how physical, on-premise manual work could be moved to remote, invisible locations, has evolved into a decade-long mission to fortify Africa’s digital sovereignty through the cloud.
Banking beginnings and lessons in resilience
Ogunwemimo’s career began in the demanding environment of the Nigerian banking sector. Starting at Ecobank in 2017 as a command centre officer, he acted as a guardian of system uptime long before “site reliability engineering” became a standard industry buzzword. His stints at UBA and Access Bank were defined by a transition from mobile support to performance analysis, ensuring that applications were optimal for production workloads before they ever reached a customer.
The pivotal moment of his career arrived when he witnessed the limitations of traditional hardware. Ogunwemimo recalls an instance where a Nigerian commercial bank suffered a three-week outage during the Christmas period because a physical server rack failed in a data centre.
“If that had been in a cloud ecosystem with resilience and scalability, it would never have happened,” he says. This realisation, that cloud adoption leads to faster innovation, happier customers, and significant cost savings, is the sermon he now continues to preach to bank executives.
The shift from traditional server management to modern DevOps reached a new peak when Ogunwemimo joined the Canadian company, Igloo Software. There, he worked as a cloud administrator for an estate of over 8,000 resources in the cloud. Managing infrastructure at this scale required an absolute command of Azure and a shift toward the automated principles he now implements at Giacom.
Despite his mastery of complex hybrid architectures where cloud environments interface with on-premise data centres, Ogunwemimo remains grounded in the “why” of engineering. He is currently pursuing his Microsoft Certified Trainer certification, a step toward his long-term goal of launching a consultancy firm that provides expert cloud architects to companies struggling with digital migration.
The philosophy of the foundation
In a market increasingly saturated by artificial intelligence (AI), Ogunwemimo warns against the trend of vibe coding, the practice of relying on AI to generate code without understanding the underlying concepts.
“AI will give you what you want, but you need people who have the core skills to translate and check what AI is giving you,” he explains. “If you deploy what it gives you [without a technical knowledge base], it might pull down your entire cloud estate.”
Ogunwemimo’s commitment to fundamentals is the cornerstone of his mentorship. Whether through the Cloud Crew, where he organises mentorship for young professionals aged 18 to 25, or his contributions to Microsoft Learn, Ogunwemimo focuses on teaching the “core” of networking and logic. He believes that while AI can provide output, only humans with foundational knowledge can verify.
Investing in the next generation: The Alt school scholarship
Ogunwemimo’s desire to give back is rooted in his own history. In 2011, a technical bootcamp provided him with his first real exposure to technology, a spark that propelled his entire career. To recreate that opportunity for others, he is funding an Alt School Africa scholarship, which provides 50% tuition coverage for undergraduates in engineering diploma programs.
“Anyone from any field can apply,” Ogunwemimo says, championing the belief that many innovative minds in tech today come from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds. His philanthropy extends to the NGO sector through Tech for Good, where he helps emerging companies meet the technical needs that they otherwise could not afford, effectively saving them money that can be redirected toward their social missions.
Navigating the African infrastructure gap
While Ogunwemimo works internationally, his focus remains firmly on Africa and Nigeria.
“Africa has the talent and is developing the skill, but we lack the resources and infrastructure,” he says, before iterating his vision for the future, which involves a robust network of African cloud service providers (CSPs). He aims to have these CSPs allow data to remain on the continent while providing the same level of accessibility as global giants like Azure or AWS.
By empowering young Africans to innovate within their own context, Ogunwemimo is not just building systems; he is building a future where Africa’s digital growth is no longer stunted by its borders.
