Awwal Adewuyi

I take products from zero to production, and I bring the people with me. Those two halves are the same job: software that reaches users, and engineers who can keep it there after I leave the room.

I did not come to this through a graduate scheme. I managed a cyber café in Jos for its owner, and that is where I taught myself to write code — in the quiet hours, on the machines I was there to look after. It is also where I watched people try to do something that mattered to them on a bad connection with equipment that was not helping. I started building things other people actually used in 2019, read Computer Science at the University of Ilorin alongside that, and have been paid to ship software since 2022.

That order explains most of how I work. I am unsentimental about software that only runs in good conditions, because I spent twelve years watching what bad conditions actually do to people.

I lead and I build, which is why both titles are on this page. Leading a team without writing any of the code costs you the judgement that made you worth following; writing all of it yourself costs the team. I have spent five years trying not to give up either.

Most of my work has been in places where the system had to be correct about money. A commerce platform where orders, payments and supplier accounts have to agree at the end of every day. A marketplace holding funds between two people who might disagree. Payment integrations across Paystack, Monnify, OPay and Unified Payments, with reconciliation that survives retries, duplicate callbacks and out-of-order delivery. That work sets the standard I hold everything else to.

I lead the engineering team at MRTEN Global Tech and I am CTO of PaySahbi, which I am building now. I mentor at IOTBTECH, where I wrote the 2026 curriculum and where the measure of a student is whether they have something deployed with their name on it. I work from Ilorin and Lagos, travel anywhere in Nigeria for the work that needs it, and work remotely with teams everywhere.