African fintech runs on trust, reliability, and scale. Behind every successful payment, transfer, or integration is an engineer ensuring systems work seamlessly under pressure. Taiwo Bukola is one such engineer.
A Senior Software Engineer at TeamApt, a subsidiary of Moniepoint Incorporated, Taiwo works on backend payment systems that power everyday financial transactions for businesses and individuals across Africa. His journey into engineering began in hands-on roles where learning was fast and errors carried real consequences. Over time, his work in regulated banking environments shaped a mindset centered on reliability, clarity, and resilience.
In this conversation, Taiwo shares his path into software engineering, how he designs systems for scale in fintech, lessons from production failures, and advice for engineers building critical infrastructure in Africa’s fast-growing digital economy.
What inspired your journey into engineering, and how did it lead to your role at TeamApt?
I started out as an analyst at the e-commerce company Jumia, where I monitored stock levels and sales behavior. During that time, engineering stood out to me. Writing code gave me a direct way to solve problems and see results quickly.
That interest led to my first engineering role at the Ecobank Software Center, where I joined as an intern and grew into an associate engineer. From there, I became deliberate about working in environments where engineering quality mattered.
I moved deeper into banking systems, where reliability is non-negotiable because the software processes live financial activity. Mistakes show up immediately. Those experiences eventually led me to TeamApt, where I’ve spent the last two years working on large-scale payment and integration systems.
Can you walk us through a typical day or week in your role as a Software Engineer?
My day usually starts with short check-ins with my manager and teammates. We align priorities and unblock issues. After that, I plan my work and focus on building.
Most of my time is spent on backend engineering, designing services, working on integrations, reviewing pull requests, and resolving production issues. Since the systems run continuously, performance and reliability are always top of mind. Before the day ends, I send updates, so the team knows what moved forward and what still needs attention.
What kind of systems do you work on technically?
I work primarily on payment flows and internal platforms. This includes backend services that handle large transaction volumes, integrations with banks and third-party systems, and tools for monitoring failures, latency, and system health.
How do you think about designing systems for scale in fintech?
Scale starts with assumptions. You assume systems will fail. You assume traffic will spike. You assume dependencies will respond slowly; or not at all.
In fintech, retries happen. Duplicate requests happen. Background jobs restart. So, APIs must behave predictably every time. Services need to be loosely coupled so one failure doesn’t bring down everything else. This approach keeps systems usable during incidents and easier to grow over time.
What engineering principles guide how you build systems?
Clarity, reliability, observability, and scalability.
Code should be readable without explanation. Systems should fail safely. Logs and metrics should tell you what happened. Growth shouldn’t require constant rewrites. I try to keep services focused, responsibilities clear, and interfaces predictable. When something breaks, answers should surface quickly.
How do you handle incidents and production issues?
First, stay calm. Panic makes things worse. Then I focus on impact, who is affected and what needs to stop immediately.
After recovery, we document what happened. The goal is improvement, not blame. We fix root causes, add alerts, and improve tests. Production incidents usually expose gaps worth closing.
What technical mistakes do you see engineers make early in their careers?
Ignoring edge cases, overengineering too early, and under engineering critical paths.
Many people focus only on the happy path. Real systems fail on the unhappy ones, timeouts, retries, partial writes, and data inconsistencies cause most problems. Skipping documentation also hurts. Even short notes help future you.
What skills helped you grow beyond just writing features?
Reading logs, debugging production issues, and understanding how data flows through systems. Feature work teaches syntax. Production work teaches engineering. Once you see systems underload, your decisions change.
How do you approach code reviews?
I look for clarity first. Can someone understand this in six months? Does the code fail safely? Are edge cases handled?
Style matters less than intent. Clear intent keeps refactoring easy. Code reviews are also how teams share context and align on standards.
What role does testing play in your work?
Tests protect behavior. I focus on testing critical paths; payment initiation, state transitions, retry logic, and failure handling.
Not everything needs deep testing. The parts that move money do.
How do you think about security in financial systems?
Security starts with design. Limit access, validate inputs, and log sensitive actions carefully.
You always assume someone will try to break the system. That assumption shapes how you build.
How do you decompress after a tough bug or tight deadline?
I step away. Sometimes I eat or take a short walk around my estate. Other times I call a friend, take a nap, watch a series, or play console games. Distance helps reset my head.
What emerging technologies or trends are you paying attention to?
Artificial Intelligence. It’s already changing how engineers work, but a bigger shift is happening outside traditional tech roles.
Fashion, music, manufacturing, healthcare, and education now depend directly on software. Engineers need to understand how these changes affect real users.
What advice would you give to aspiring software engineers?
Focus on fundamentals. Understand data structures, basic networking processes, and how systems fail. Learn patiently. Strong fundamentals make complex systems easier to reason about later.
If you could work on any project in the world without limitations, what would it be?
Education. I’d work on simulation-based training for healthcare and engineering. Realistic practice improves learning and decision-making.
I’d also focus on AI literacy. Many professionals outside tech need clear guidance on using AI in daily work. AI is more than ChatGPT.
What advice would you give to developers to build systems on a scale?
Think about scale early. Architecture matters. Folder structure and tooling matter.
Ignoring these early leads to technical debt. Write things down. Track technical debt. Schedule dependency upgrades. Avoid systems you hesitate to maintain.
If you could have dinner with any engineer or tech leader, who would it be and why?
I’m interested in people who build large systems; Elizabeth Stone from Netflix, Mark Zuckerberg, and the teams behind GitHub.
They influence how millions of developers build and ship software. I’d like to understand how they think about scale and long-term system growth.
I also admire Apple. Their focus on user experience shows discipline. I want to understand how teams maintain that level of quality over time.
What should engineers focus on beyond writing code?
Adaptability. Technology moves fast. You need judgment to decide what matters and what doesn’t matter.
How do you keep up with new tools and ideas?
I curate information carefully. Who I follow matters. What I ignore matters. That keeps the signal clear.
What resources would you recommend to aspiring software engineers?
Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
Both focus on habits; and habits shape long careers.
Looking ahead, what does the future of African fintech look like to you?
African fintech will continue to move fast, but the next phase will be about depth, not just speed. We’ll see fewer experiments and more infrastructure that must last; systems that are reliable, compliant, and able to scale sustainably across borders.
I think payments will become more invisible, embedded directly into everyday products and services. The real work for engineers will be building resilient systems behind the scenes that users never have to think about. There will also be more collaboration between fintech’s, banks, and regulators, which will push engineering standards higher.
For African engineers, this future is an opportunity. We won’t just be building for local use—we’ll be building systems that can compete globally, designed from the start to handle scale, complexity, and trust.
As Africa’s fintech ecosystem continues to scale, engineers like Taiwo Bukola play a critical role in building systems that are not only fast, but trustworthy and resilient. His journey; from analytics to banking systems to large-scale payments; highlights the importance of fundamentals, thoughtful system design, and calm decision-making under pressure.
Beyond the code, Taiwo’s perspective reminds us that great engineering is about responsibility: to users, to teams, and to the systems millions depend on every day.
