Grace Ashiru
Jesutomiwa Salam’s story doesn’t start in a bootcamp success montage. It starts in the kind of isolation that either breaks curiosity or turns it into a private obsession. Limited internet. Minimal community. No older friend pulling them into a tech circle. No public roadmap. Just a growing certainty that if you wanted to learn, you would have to build your own ladder.
The origin point is oddly cinematic. Jesutomiwa remembers seeing the “nerdy coder” archetype in the film Spare Parts, not as a joke character, but as someone with an unfair advantage: the ability to translate ideas into working systems. That archetype became a mirror. A short six-week stint in web development school was supposed to be a trial. Instead, it became permission. Not the kind granted by an institution, but the kind you take for yourself: “I can do this. I can figure it out.”
Learning by Building What People Actually Use
So Jesutomiwa did what self-taught engineers do when there’s nothing else: books, experiments, repetition, building by doing. The first real proof wasn’t a portfolio site or a tutorial clone. It was production work as a teenager: a functional website for their parents’ secondary school. It mattered because it was real. It had users. It had expectations. It had the quiet pressure that teaches you what software actually is: responsibility.
That early constraint shaped a technical personality that later became a career advantage. Jesutomiwa didn’t grow into engineering through environments that reward polish and hype. They grew into it through environments that reward correctness. And that difference becomes obvious in the problems Jesutomiwa gravitates toward now: payments, reconciliation, settlement, systems where “almost working” is the same as broken.
In African tech, these are the systems that don’t get celebrated until they fail. Everyone sees the UI. Few people understand the infrastructure that keeps money honest across messy real-world actors: insurers and providers, merchants and payment rails, crypto markets and fiat settlement. The job is not to build something flashy. The job is to create a reliable truth in a world that keeps producing contradictions.
Building Confidence, Not Just Pipelines
This is where Jesutomiwa’s instincts show. They don’t just build pipelines. They build confidence. They design systems that can explain themselves, where reliability is not a feeling, but a property of how the system was constructed.
At Patricia, the work moved into a different kind of volatility: crypto-to-fiat settlement for B2B merchants. Crypto introduces a hard truth into payment infrastructure: value can change while a transaction is still in motion. A merchant doesn’t want to “accept crypto.” They want to get paid. They want stable fiat. They want to run their business without inheriting the complexity of blockchain infrastructure or the price swings it entails. Jesutomiwa designed key components of a settlement system that stabilised volatility, enabling merchants to receive stable fiat seamlessly without needing to touch the underlying complexity.
Again, the story isn’t about crypto. It’s about abstraction and reliability. It’s about building a system that protects the user from the hardest parts of the technology.
By this point, a pattern emerges: Jesutomiwa operates in the parts of software where mistakes are expensive, invisible, and unforgiving. That’s why the “self-taught” label is not the headline here. The headline is: this is an architect forged by constraints, specialising in the kind of systems that keep businesses alive.
Making Reliability a Culture, Not a Hero Story
And then there’s the leadership thread, the part that’s easy to miss because it doesn’t come with press. Jesutomiwa is known for empowering developers with autonomy, building shared responsibility through clear, inclusive communication, and running weekly recognition sessions that deliberately highlight team wins, especially for the quiet engineers whose work sits underneath everything and rarely gets public credit.
That matters because infrastructure teams often operate in silence. When the work is “no outages,” the best weeks look like nothing happened. Keeping morale healthy in that environment is a leadership skill, not a personality trait. Jesutomiwa’s leadership approach treats reliability as a team culture problem as much as a technical one.
Africa’s most consequential engineers aren’t always the most visible ones. They are the ones building the silent machinery—the systems that sit between a business and collapse. The engineers who never get a headline for shipping, but whose absence would turn every product into a series of arguments about what “really happened” in the system.
AI’s Speed Makes Architecture More Important, Not Less
And the timing matters. We are entering an era in which AI changes what gets built and how quickly teams can ship. But speed doesn’t erase architecture. It makes it more important. When code becomes cheaper to produce, correctness becomes the differentiator. Reliability becomes the product. The best teams will not be the ones that generate the most features, but the ones that design systems that can scale without becoming fragile, explain themselves when things go wrong, and stay aligned with the constraints of the real world.
That’s where Jesutomiwa is heading: building AI frameworks that bridge ideas to execution. architectural patterns that help teams ship scalable, intuitive systems that stay coherent under pressure. Not architecture as diagrams, but architecture as operational truth.
Jesutomiwa’s story is ultimately about a kind of engineering maturity that doesn’t trend: building what people depend on, under conditions that don’t forgive mistakes. In a continent where constraints are normal and ambiguity is the default, that skill isn’t just valuable. It’s foundational.
