Open to opportunities

Ifeoluwa Olanipekun

@ifeoluwaolanipekun

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Founding Engineer and Technical Lead building secure, high-throughput fintech infrastructure and payment systems.

Nigeria

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead hands-on teams building secure, high-throughput fintech and payments infrastructure—core ledger, card issuance, and real-time verification—backed by strong DevOps, observability, and regulatory-grade compliance.

I’m a Founding Engineer and Technical Lead with 9+ years of expertise building large-scale fintech platforms and mission-critical financial infrastructure. I architect and deliver fault-tolerant distributed systems while staying deeply hands-on in production code.

At Source MFB, I single-handedly designed and built the bank’s core banking technology stack, security layer, and DevOps infrastructure from scratch—then scaled the team from 0 to 15 engineers. I engineered highly available financial architectures delivering 99.9%+ uptime for mission-critical banking transactions and core ledgers.

I spearheaded the technical architecture and implementation of the Afrigo card scheme, achieving strict PCI-DSS compliance and alignment with regional central bank (CBN) security frameworks. I also built automated CI/CD deployment pipelines using AWS, Docker, and Nginx to enable zero-downtime hotfixes, supported by Prometheus and Grafana monitoring that reduced incident detection times.

Previously at Mono (YC W21), I led backend engineering for payment collection services, scaling transaction ingestion and building foundational card and account issuance infrastructure. I designed a resilient, real-time NUBAN payment verification system, strengthened security with rate-limiting and defensive architectures, and improved performance via query indexing, load balancing, and multi-tier API caching.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founding Engineer & Tech Lead

Current

Source MFB

Jun 2023 - Present (3 years)

Single-handedly designed and built Source MFB’s core banking technology stack, security layer, and DevOps infrastructure, scaling the engineering team from 0 to 15. Delivered 99.9%+ uptime for mission-critical banking transactions and led PCI-DSS-compliant Afrigo card scheme technical architecture and issuance.

Core Banking PCI DSS Microservices AWS Docker Nginx CI CD Pipelines Prometheus Grafana Security Engineering

Backend Engineering Lead

Mono(YC W21)

May 2021 - Jun 2023 (2 years 1 month)

Architected and executed backend systems for a payment collection service, scaling transaction ingestion for high-frequency concurrent traffic. Built card/account issuance infrastructure and a real-time NUBAN payment verification system with asynchronous job scheduling, improving performance via indexing and multi-tier API caching.

Payment Processing Transaction Ingestion Systems NUBAN Verification MySQL MongoDB Performance Tuning Caching Distributed Systems

Lead Mobile Software Engineer

Credit Direct

Jan 2021 - May 2021 (4 months)

Led a cross-functional team to build, test, and deploy Credit Direct’s core digital debt management platform. Authored and deployed the customer mobile app in React Native using clean architectural patterns for reusable, performant state management.

React Native Mobile Application Development Clean Architecture State Management Cross functional Leadership Performance Optimization

Lead Software Engineer

VeendHQ

Jul 2018 - Oct 2020 (2 years 3 months)

Designed and scaled a consumer lending pipeline processing over $3,000,000 in monthly transaction volume by April 2020. Built a SOAP-based NIBSS Instant Payment server and integrated enterprise banking partners and payment gateways (including Flutterwave and Paystack) to enable ledger synchronization and multi-party settlement rules.

Consumer Lending NIBSS Instant Payments Payment Gateways Wallet Funding Mechanics Distributed Systems