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Emmanuel Popoola

@emmanuelpopoola

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Backend engineer and team lead building reliable fintech APIs, integrations, and high-availability systems.

Nigeria

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead backend and integrations in fintech—owning API reliability, observability, and secure payment workflows—collaborating cross-functionally to scale high-volume systems and ship improvements quickly.

I’m a Backend Engineer with 7+ years of fintech experience, building reliable REST APIs and third-party integrations with strong focus on error handling, retries, timeouts, and idempotency. I’ve supported 2M+ transactions/month and improved uptime to 99.99% while boosting API responsiveness by up to 40%.

In my recent roles (Lead Backend Engineer at Palremit and Integrations Team Lead at Fincra), I’ve owned end-to-end backend reliability and observability, shipped core payment and wallet capabilities for 100k+ users, and expanded payment/financial availability across multiple countries and partners. I enjoy turning failure scenarios into durable workflows—through monitoring, performance tuning, security controls, and clean API contracts—while mentoring engineers and standardizing delivery.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Lead Backend Engineer

Current

Palremit

Dec 2023 - Present (2 years 6 months)

Led backend development of Node.js and MongoDB REST APIs for a crypto wallet platform supporting secure wallet creation, management, and transfers for 100k+ users. Improved uptime to 99.99% and boosted API responsiveness by up to 40% through reliability, monitoring, and performance tuning.

JavaScript MongoDB RESTful API Design Reliability Engineering Observability Encryption Error Handling Performance Tuning

Integrations Team Lead

Fincra Technologies

Apr 2023 - Mar 2024 (11 months)

Led high-volume integrations for payouts, collections, transaction monitoring, KYC, and agency banking across 40+ partners, supporting 2M+ transactions per month. Owned end-to-end REST API integrations with reusable connectors and automation guardrails that reduced integration risk and time-to-market by 1 week.

REST APIs Integration Architecture KYC Payouts Error Handling Automation API Documentation Stakeholder Management Mentoring

Checkout Payments Lead

Fincra Technologies

Jan 2022 - Mar 2023 (1 year 2 months)

Founded and led the Checkout Payments team, owning backend services and REST APIs for a scalable checkout product and financial workflows. Expanded payment corridors across 12+ currencies and improved transaction success rates to 92% by implementing multi-channel routing, approval flows, and robust failure handling.

Payment Routing Settlement Services RESTful APIs T+N Settlement Workflows

Senior Backend Engineer

Payday

Oct 2021 - Aug 2022 (10 months)

Led migration from monolithic Node.js APIs to scalable microservices, improving maintainability for 100k+ active users. Rebuilt financial workflow services including KYC, wallets, and funding with production-ready error handling, and delivered a fault-tolerant webhook/notification pipeline using retries and idempotency.

Microservices RESTful API Design KYC Webhooks Error Handling Distributed Systems

Fullstack Engineer

Fliqpay

Nov 2019 - Jan 2022 (2 years 2 months)

Built and maintained Node.js/TypeScript backend services for payouts, collections, wallets, authentication, and notifications. Decomposed a monolithic API into microservices, designed MongoDB-backed CRUD APIs, and improved observability using ElasticStack while supporting event-driven workflows with RabbitMQ and Redis.

TypeScript MongoDB Microservices RESTful APIs CRUD APIs RabbitMQ Redis ElasticStack

Frontend Engineer

Quidax

Feb 2020 - Jul 2020 (5 months)

Built a custom Progressive Web App (PWA) using Next.js to support an external application integration with maintainable frontend flows. Shipped conversion-focused website improvements in collaboration with UX/UI, contributing to a 25% increase in conversion rate and provided production support for web issues.

Next.js PWA JavaScript Frontend Responsive UI Conversion Optimization

Frontend Developer

FavCode54

Mar 2018 - Jul 2019 (1 year 4 months)

Built and iterated 10+ marketing landing pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, translating designs into production-ready UI. Implemented mobile-first responsive layouts with Bootstrap and improved form UX and client-side validation, increasing visitor form completion by 2x.

HTML CSS JavaScript Bootstrap Responsive Design Landing Page Development

Web Developer

NCK Technologies

Aug 2017 - May 2018 (9 months)

Maintained and improved web application codebases using JavaScript and PHP, reducing defects through bug fixes and peer code reviews. Converted mockups into responsive cross-browser UI and built HTML email templates/newsletters with consistent rendering across major email clients.

JavaScript PHP HTML CSS Responsive Web Design Code Review