JamesOkafor

Freelance Software Consultant12+ YEARSLagos, Nigeria

Independent software consultant working with venture-backed startups on hard infrastructure problems. Twelve years building distributed systems. Most recently helped a West African fintech process 40 million transactions a month without breaking, then taught the team how to keep it running. I take on three to four engagements a year — embedded with the team, leaving them better than I found them.

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Experience 4 ROLES

2020 — Present
Independent Software Consultant +
Self-employed· Remote · West Africa & Europe
Engaged by venture-backed startups on infrastructure, payments and reliability. Typical engagement: 3–6 months embedded with the team, fixing what's broken and leaving a runbook. Clients include a Series-B fintech in Lagos, a logistics platform in Nairobi, a stablecoin issuer in London, and a healthcare data startup in Berlin. Word-of-mouth pipeline; haven't had to advertise yet.
Distributed systemsPaymentsReliabilityMentorshipWord-of-mouth
2017 — 2020
Senior Software Engineer +
Andela· Lagos
Built the internal platform that placed 1,400+ African engineers with global companies. Led the migration from a Rails monolith to a service-oriented architecture without a single production outage. Mentored 14 junior engineers, six of whom are now senior at FAANG companies.
Rails → SOA1,400 placementsZero-downtime migrationMentor
2013 — 2017
Backend Engineer +
Konga· Lagos
Joined as the 4th engineer and helped scale the order-processing pipeline from a few hundred orders a day to over 30k. Wrote the payment-reconciliation system that's still running today, ten years later, with the same code I committed in 2014. Sometimes that's a flex; sometimes it's a horror story.
Early-stageOrder systemsReconciliation
2012 — 2013
Junior Engineer +
Interswitch· Lagos
First job out of university at Nigeria's biggest payments processor. Wrote SQL reports for the compliance team. Looked at a lot of payments data. Learned how money actually moves around the system.
First jobPayments fundamentals

Tech Stack 6 AREAS · CLICK TO EXPAND

Distributed SystemsQueues · Idempotency · Consistency
+
Twelve years of designing systems that survive partial failure. Comfortable explaining CAP trade-offs to a founder without making them feel small. Specialise in retry semantics, exactly-once processing, and the unglamorous reconciliation jobs that catch what the happy path misses.
Payments InfrastructureReconciliation · Webhooks · Disputes
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Built payments rails for African and European fintechs. Familiar with the ugly edges — failed webhooks, double-spends, dispute flows, regulatory holds. Have seen what happens when a stablecoin issuer's reconciliation drifts by 0.01% over a quarter; you do not want to see that.
Cloud InfrastructureAWS · Terraform · Kubernetes
+
Production AWS for a decade. Comfortable with everything from raw EC2 to fully Kubernetes-native deployments. Strong opinions about when not to reach for Kubernetes.
LanguagesRuby · Go · TypeScript
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Ruby for years, then Go and TypeScript as the ecosystem moved. Language-agnostic in approach — the hard problems are rarely about syntax. Can read enough Python and Java to debug other people's services.
ObservabilityMetrics · Tracing · Logs
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Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, occasionally Datadog when budget allows. I install observability on day one of an engagement; you can't fix what you can't see.
MentorshipPairing · Reviews · Career chats
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Closely-paired technical mentorship is the biggest leverage point in any engagement. I leave teams better at the work I was hired to do, so I don't have to come back for the same problem.

Achievements CLICK TO EXPAND

01
Scaled Pesahub to 40M txns/month
2024 · 6-month engagement · Series-B fintech
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Inherited a Rails app processing ~5M transactions a month with regular outages. Six months later: 40M+ transactions a month, sub-second p99 latency, and a four-person on-call rotation that knew the system end-to-end. The team has since shipped two major new products on the same foundation without needing me back.
02
Andela platform migration · zero downtime
2019 · Rails monolith → SOA
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Led the 18-month migration of Andela's placement platform from a single Rails monolith to a service-oriented architecture across six bounded contexts. Zero production outages during the entire migration. The strangler pattern, ruthlessly applied.
03
Spoke at DevOps Days Africa 2023
2023 · "Why your queue is lying to you"
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Keynote on the failure modes of message queues in payments contexts — duplicate delivery, ordering guarantees, dead-letter design. Recording has 22k views. Several people in the audience have since become clients.