Michael Owolabi

ABOUT ME

Software Engineer

Michael is a senior engineering leader with 8+ years of experience, including 3 years as the CTO of

a venture-backed company ($3.6M raised), where he led a 13-person cross-functional engineering

and product organization. He exhibits an executive-level ownership of engineering strategy,

organisational design, performance management, and delivery governance. Experienced in

managing managers, leading structured hiring processes, implementing performance and

compensation frameworks, and aligning technical roadmaps with business strategy. Seeking to

apply executive leadership experience within larger-scale, technology organisations.

English

West Central Africa (+01:00)

Joined May 2019

EXPERTISE

3 years experience

5 years experience

5 years experience

4 years experience

4 years experience

5 years experience

4 years experience

SOCIAL PRESENCE

GitHub

node-redis-caching-tut

JavaScript

send-sms-with-twilio

JavaScript

Community Posts

Coding Convention: Why your team should adopt one quickly

Your team needs to adopt its coding convention and do it quickly. This is a case of either do it or suffer the consequences. I am sure you have seen various arguments on issues like tab and space,...

Ask questions, ask lots of it

If there is one thing that software development has taught well, it is the fact that whatever you don’t know, you do not know. You cannot brag or pretend your way into building or fixing stuff in...

Caching in Node.js using Redis

If you could save hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds in response time of your application, wouldn't you want to do that? That's why I just published an article on Implementing caching in Node.js using Redis. Read, comment, and share

EMPLOYMENTS

Chief Technology Officer

Spleet Africa

2022-11-01-2026-01-01

Led a 13-person cross-functional engineering and product organisation, including direct management of a Product Manager who manag...

Led a 13-person cross-functional engineering and product organisation, including direct management of a Product Manager who managed additional PM resources, establishing clear reporting structures and accountability frameworks defining technical strategy and execution roadmap.
Designed and implemented structured performance review cycles, compensation processes, and career progression frameworks to support sustainable team growth.
Partnered with executive leadership to translate company strategy into quarterly engineering OKRs and technical roadmaps, improving delivery predictability and cross-functional alignment.
Owned hiring strategy for senior engineers, designing structured interview loops and raising the technical hiring bar across backend, frontend, and infrastructure roles.
Launched a credit-enabled "Rent Now, Pay Later" product achieving <5% non-performing loans in its first year through risk-aware system design, robust evaluation system and monitoring.
Established incident response and blameless postmortem processes, improving system stability and cross-team learning culture.
Implemented structured engineering mentorship and performance frameworks, improving delivery velocity by ~20% and elevating code quality standards.
Strengthened security policies/systems by aligning company policies and engineering operations practices with ISO 27001 procedures and guides.

Strategy

System design

Engineering Management

Strategy

System design

Engineering Management

ISO 27001 Lead Auditor

Corporate performance management

Engineering Lead

Spleet Africa

2021-12-01-2022-11-01

Led re-architecture of the Spleet marketplace platform, reducing latency and improving conversion efficiency, resulting in about ...

Led re-architecture of the Spleet marketplace platform, reducing latency and improving conversion efficiency, resulting in about 58% reduction in time to list property.
Led the development of the Spleet Verify product, which helps landlords verify the identity of potential tenants and also their affordability for the intended apartment, thereby saving Landlords tons of bad deals and liabilities.
Developed and scaled our engineering competency matrix to define clear career paths, fostering a culture of continuous learning and increasing internal promotion rates.

Architectural Design

Engineering Management

Continuous discovery

Architectural Design

Engineering Management

Continuous discovery

Senior Software Engineer

Spleet Africa

2020-02-01-2021-12-01

Led performance optimization initiative, reducing system latency by ~70% through architectural redesign and strategic Redis imple...

Led performance optimization initiative, reducing system latency by ~70% through architectural redesign and strategic Redis implementation (as both cache and data store) for some key product components.

Redis

Architectural Design

Performance Optimization

Redis

Architectural Design

Performance Optimization

PROJECTS

Proptech + Financial ServicesView Project

2023

Property Technology Platform for rentals, landlords, and property managers. This also include a credit sub product that facilitates renta...

Property Technology Platform for rentals, landlords, and property managers. This also include a credit sub product that facilitates rental loans for rentals. Had a record breaking <5% NPL in our first year of launch

Node.js

MySQL

TypeScript

Node.js

MySQL

TypeScript

Google Cloud Platform

TypeORM

NestJS