When Azeez Ibrahim Akinkunmi began his tech journey in 2012, it wasn’t with grand ambitions or the backing of elite institutions. It was a quiet spark, a simple HTML introduction during his first industrial training as a 100-level Computer Science student at Lagos State Polytechnic. But that moment set him on a path defined not just by code, but by curiosity, resilience, and impact.
It started with a challenge: proving a point to one of his father’s friends who mocked Computer Science students, saying they all ended up fixing computers in Lagos’ Computer Village. For Azeez, that was motivation enough. His journey soon evolved from front-end tinkering to hands-on work with CCTV, intercoms, and fire alarms. But it was a deeply personal experience, a friend losing an uncle due to delayed blood donation that grounded his purpose. Azeez envisioned and built a blood donation platform that could connect donors with hospitals and banks in real time. That drive to build meaningful systems never left him.
The Growth Curve: From Bloc to Kyshi
Azeez’s first formal role came at Bloc, where he served as an Integrations Engineer. His day-to-day involved integrating third-party APIs, but the learning went far deeper. He led onboarding efforts for new DISCOs, implemented money transfer systems, and gained critical experience in systems design, asynchronous processes, and navigating regulated environments. It was also his first taste of leadership, managing a small team and learning the value of mentorship, sacrifice, and high standards.
From there, his journey included pivotal roles at Jasetech Limited, where he mastered the art of balancing speed and code quality under pressure, and Kyshi, where backend optimization and real-time reliability were core to his work in scaling fintech infrastructure. Each role was more than a title, it was a laboratory for sharpening skills, gaining perspective, and influencing broader engineering decisions.
Philosophy in Practice
Today, Azeez is guided by a trio of backend engineering principles:
- Build for change: Write code that anticipates evolution.
- Simplicity scales: Small, clear interfaces outperform bloated architectures.
- Fail fast, learn faster: Testing, logs, and observability aren’t extras—they’re essentials.
This mindset shines in how he tackles complexity. When systems go off-script, Azeez doesn’t panic. He steps back, gathers context, simulates the flow end-to-end, and treats every failure as data. “No blame, just signals,” he says. It’s this philosophy that shaped his approach to error logging, rollback strategies, and resilient system design.
Learning from Failure
Azeez recalls one of his toughest lessons, a failed production rollout caused by ignoring undocumented rate limits on a downstream dependency. It worked fine in staging but collapsed under load. That moment reinforced a crucial lesson: never assume, especially in production environments. Build for what can go wrong, not just what should go right.
Leadership & Culture
Beyond the terminal, Azeez is a builder of teams and culture. He’s mentored junior engineers, led workflow improvements, and advocated for deployment practices that prioritize reliability and sustainability. He leads by showing, not just telling, and always pushes for long-term technical decisions, even when they require more upfront effort.
For the Next Generation
If you’re just getting started in tech, Azeez offers three guiding lessons:
- Get a mentor – Learning from someone ahead of you can accelerate growth.
- Be curious, not just competent – Don’t just learn tools; understand their principles.
- Think in systems – Don’t build to impress; build to last.
From his early days trying to disprove a stereotype to shaping backend systems at scale, Azeez Ibrahim Akinkunmi’s story is proof that in tech, curiosity and consistency often beat credentials. He’s not just writing code, he’s engineering trust, building systems that serve, and inspiring a new generation of African engineers to lead from the inside out.
