Adora Nwodo

Engineering Leader & Author

Adora Nwodo is a multiple-award-winning engineering leader and published author working across cloud, AI, and developer experience. Her work focuses on building intelligent platforms, distributed systems, and scalable cloud infrastructure. She has held engineering and leadership roles at Stack Overflow and Microsoft, working at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and organizational execution. She’s the author of seven books on cloud engineering, DevOps, and technology leadership and serves as executive director of NexaScale, a nonprofit whose mission is to expand access to technology education for African technologists.

Ayodeji Akinola

Software and Infrastructure Engineer, Daya

Ayodeji Akinola is a software and infrastructure engineer at Daya, where he works on the FX matching engine and the infrastructure it runs on. He has spent over six years designing low-latency trading and payment systems, ranging from FIX-based HFT platforms to payment rails. Ayodeji is also a contributor to Reth, Paradigm's open-source Rust Ethereum client.

abiola adeshina

Software & AI Infrastructure Engineer | Workstream Lead, Flow Research

Abiola Adedayo Adeshina is a Software & AI Infrastructure Engineer, founder of omnirexflora-labs, and Workstream Lead at Flow Research. He builds distributed backends, agent runtimes, memory, orchestration and evaluation systems. He leads Workstream's design and development at Flow Research and creates and reviews AI evaluation tasks as an Expert Contributor and Reviewer at Snorkel AI. His experience covers both building contribution infrastructure and doing the task-authoring and review work these workflows support. He will draw on his engineering work on Workstream, using an AI evaluation example prepared for this talk.

Ayomide Oyekanmi (Moderator)

Senior SRE TL at Google

Ayomide is a Senior SRE TL at Google where he works on Cloud Filestore. Previously, he worked at TeamApt (now Moniepoint) where he built fintech products for multiple banks. He is passionate about problems in Distributed Systems, OSs and Algorithms. He is also the co-founder of SysDsgn which created SysConf and a DSA program.

Bubunyo Nyavor

Adjust Gmbh, Software Engineer.

I am a software engineer from Ghana, and an Administrator at DevCongress, the largest developer community in Ghana with a passion for teaching, knowledge sharing and learning.

Chidinma Kalu

Full-stack Software Engineer

Chidinma Kalu is a senior software engineer and technical writer focused on distributed systems, with 9+ years of experience building and evolving large-scale backend systems. Currently at Booking.com, she works on and owns systems where scale, correctness and reliability matter. She enjoys thinking about how systems work, the trade-offs behind the choices we make when designing them, and the often surprising ways those choices show up under real-world constraints. She is particularly interested in making complex systems ideas intuitive without losing the technical details that make them interesting.

Festus Owumi

AI Inference Engineer

Festus Owumi is an engineering leader and ML systems engineer with experience building production distributed systems, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, AI/ML serving systems, and GPU inference infrastructure. His work focuses on LLM inference systems, spanning research, contract engineering, and open-source contributions across vLLM and NVIDIA Dynamo. He is an external contributor to NVIDIA Dynamo, NVIDIA’s distributed inference framework for data-center-scale serving, where he contributed a merged Qwen3-32B-FP8 vLLM recipe for disaggregated inference on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, separating prefill and decode across different GPU workers (2x prefill workers with TP=2 + 1x decode worker with TP=4). He has also contributed to vLLM, the widely adopted high-throughput, memory-efficient LLM inference and serving engine originally developed at UC Berkeley. Outside engineering, Festus writes frequently on Medium, where he breaks down complex systems concepts from first principles. When he is not thinking about distributed systems or LLM inference, he can often be found chasing his next running PB.

Frederick Bondzie-Arthur

Technical Lead, Data Engineering at Fido Money | Digital Product & Technology Leader

Frederick Emile Bondzie-Arthur is a Technical Lead in Data Engineering at Fido Money, where he leads engineering work across data platforms, real-time credit decisioning, identity verification and ML-driven lending systems operating across multiple African markets. He has worked across product, software engineering and data engineering, with a focus on building production systems where data correctness, reliability and latency directly affect financial decisions. His recent work includes designing the feature-generation architecture and feature-serving layer behind Fido’s ML-based credit decisioning platform, as well as building data products for experimentation, KYC/AML and financial operations. Frederick is particularly interested in the engineering problems that appear when systems move from prototypes to production: data correctness, distributed systems, observability, reliability and the gap between what a model expects and what a production system actually serves.

Gideon Aleonogwe

SRE and Technical Writer; Co-founder of Product Vault

Gideon Aleonogwe is an SRE and technical writer focused on making cloud platforms boring, in the best possible way: reliable, scalable, and quiet enough that nobody has to think about them. He works on observability, synthetic monitoring, and incident response for production systems at scale. He is also a co-founder of Product Vault, the team behind Monie Diary, a WhatsApp-based personal finance product. Outside work, he enjoys collecting books and window-shopping for vinyl records.

Jennifer Chukwu

Software Engineer

I am a Systems Software Engineer interested in performance engineering, concurrency, and low-level systems programming. I enjoy building software that explores the interaction between algorithms, operating systems, and hardware.

Johnkingsley Amaechi

Software Engineer

I'm Johnkingsley, a Software Engineer with over 6 years in the industry, currently focused on building AI agent systems, multi-agent infrastructure, and full stack applications across fintech, e-commerce, and healthcare. I have hands-on experience with MCP, LLM integration, and deploying production-grade agentic systems, alongside a strong foundation in JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, and Golang. I have built and shipped two AI products of my own, an AI interview platform and a conversational invoicing tool, both live in production with paying users. Beyond building, I mentor 400+ engineers globally through Codementor, with 85% going on to receive promotions or salary increases. I care deeply about building systems that work reliably in the real world, not just in demos, and I enjoy sharing the lessons learned along the way.

Elizabeth Onyenekwe

Frontend Developer- Moniepoint

Frontend Developer transitioning to Developer Relations through hands-on API integration and public documentation. Currently building in public through two 13-day series: PostHog analytics integration (posthog.hashnode.dev) and Firecrawl web scraping API (launching April 2026). Creating developer-focused content as @Hey_Techys across TikTok, LinkedIn, and Hashnode. 6+ years building production web applications. Passionate about developer experience and making APIs accessible through honest, practical analysis.

Emmanuel O. Adegbite

Product Engineering

Olukayode is a software engineer and product builder with experience building backend systems and infrastructure. Outside of work, he enjoys building side projects, experimenting with self-hosted software, and tinkering with his homelab to better understand the systems behind the software we use every day.

Myke Awoniran

Systems Research Engineer at Comnet Laboratory

Michael Awoniran is a Systems Research Engineer at the COMNET Laboratory, Obafemi Awolowo University. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, database internals, Linux I/O models, concurrency control, recovery mechanisms, and transactional storage engines. He approaches software engineering from first principles, with a focus on correctness, safety, performance, and system behaviour under real world conditions such as high concurrency, resource constraints, and failures. He has mentored final year students at the University of Doha for Science and Technology (UDST) and Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), and is passionate about computer science education, breaking down complex systems concepts into intuitive mental models that help developers understand not just how software works, but why it works that way. Outside engineering, he enjoys long distance running, listening to Hans Zimmer and Ludovico Einaudi, and writing about the fundamentals of computer systems.

Kelechi Onyekwere

Engineering Tech Lead

Kelechi Onyekwere is Software Engineer and an Independent Researcher with 7+ years of experience building quality products following industry standards, with a resilient and fault-tolerant architecture. I am passionate about distributed systems, open source, financial solutions, and blockchain.

Paschal Obba

Senior software engineer, Cloudflare

I am a Senior software engineer at Cloudflare. I work for the Web Application Firewall team and we have security products that utilize Memcached and Mcrouter.

Peculiar Erhisohwode

Founding Engineer at Chowdeck

Peculiar Erhisohwode is a software engineer with a background in backend engineering and distributed systems. She is a founding engineer at Chowdeck, one of Africa’s biggest startups, where she joined as the second backend engineer and first female software engineer. She designed, built, shipped, and owned end-to-end much of the delivery infrastructure that still runs the company today, including the polygon system this talk is about.

Phillipa Bennett-Eghan

Systems Engineer

Phillipa Bennett-Eghan is a software engineer interested in systems, distributed systems, networking, and infrastructure. She has experience building software across application and backend systems and enjoys digging beneath abstractions to understand how things work at a lower level. She is particularly interested in the engineering decisions, trade-offs, and underlying mechanisms that make software systems reliable and performant.

Atinuke Jamiu

AI Infrastructure engineer

Rasheedat is a Cloud Architect and AI Infrastructure Engineer. She builds the systems that run machine learning workloads, GPU clusters, model serving, and the platform layer around them, with a focus on making them scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient. She is also an international speaker, CNCF organizer, and community mentor, and writes about infrastructure for a living and for fun.

Wahab Balogun

Expense AI, Co-Founder

Wahab is the co-founder of Expense AI. He has over 7 years of experience as a software engineer, working at companies like Flutterwave and Chipper Cash, and at Expense AI built the mobile app, backend, and AI extraction pipeline behind this talk.

Audrey Ezeonyedika

Risevest - Senior Software Engineering

Audrey Ezeonyedika is a software engineer focused on backend systems for financial products, with experience across banking, payments, and investments. She designed and built Hisa’s trading engine and has spent the past two years building and running the infrastructure behind its trading platform, which now handles tens of thousands of orders per day. Her experience scaling the platform gives her a practical perspective on the architectural decisions, trade-offs, and failures involved in building trading systems at scale.