Abuja, November 2026
I’m Paul. I build engineering teams, and I still write a fair share of the code they ship.
I trained as a civil engineer in Cyprus, learned to program, and spent the last few years setting up and running an engineering company in Abuja. Today I’m CTO of Keztrip, a bus company I co-founded, and I run Swyft Labs, a small software studio.
2025At Keztrip we move people around Abuja by bus. I built the platform from scratch with three engineers: passenger and driver apps on iOS and Android, web apps for businesses and our own team, and a NestJS backend that handles live bus tracking, seat booking, payments and notifications. We took it from an internal pilot to a public launch, and since August riders have made nearly 4,000 paid bookings. Every month has been bigger than the one before.
2026Swyft Labs is where I build for clients. Our first big project is Innix, software that runs a hotel: the front desk, the bar and restaurant tills, and the owner’s reports, all on one data model. The first hotel goes live on it in January 2027.
2024Before that I spent more than two years as Managing Director and Engineering Manager of MBL Hightech’s company in Nigeria. I set it up from nothing: the office, the hiring, the payroll and the filings. It grew to 29 people across backend, frontend and mobile, AI, QA, design and IT.
2022I joined MBL in Kyrenia, Cyprus as a full stack engineer, starting on the frontend team. My first projects were client builds: Diggifi, a real estate lending platform, and a student application system for Girne American University. Then I spent most of my time on the company’s CRM, first on its interface and then its backend, before moving to its white-label gaming platform, which other businesses run under their own brands. Along the way I built more than seven payment integrations and designed the promo code and bonus engine.
2020I learned to code through Microverse, a remote full-stack program, and stayed on as a volunteer mentor reviewing other students’ code. I freelanced on frontend work for a year after that.
2014I studied civil engineering at Girne American University. It still shapes how I think about software: work out the loads first, and build so it holds.
I architected MBL’s multi-tenant B2B platform. Each tenant has its own configuration on shared core services.
I wrote the parts where a bug costs money myself: a wallet with pessimistic locking and audited rollbacks, domain health checks with automatic failover, and a signed integration layer for operators.
Paid bookings grew more than tenfold in two months, from 170 in August to more than 1,800 in October. Riders who join through a referral go on to ride 69% of the time, against 25% for everyone else, and we use numbers like that to decide where the marketing money goes.
Payments run through Paystack and Flutterwave.
I negotiated the scope and contract with the client, and I own the architecture. Payments use Paystack split settlement, so guest money never sits with the platform. It runs on AWS.
On teams: I set up the basics early and keep them going. Team leads who own their areas, a steady sprint rhythm, and regular one on ones.
I still write code, mostly NestJS and TypeScript on PostgreSQL, with Redis and BullMQ, and React or React Native on the front. I deploy to AWS and Cloudflare.
A lot of what I build never reaches a customer. At MBL I wrote our attendance software, which pulls punches from the ZKBio fingerprint terminals into one dashboard, and I set up Claude to review every pull request and share workflows across the team. For myself I run a set of Claude agents that commit, review, clean up migrations and drive the browser without me in the loop.
If you’re hiring an engineering manager or a CTO, or you have something that needs building well, write to me at ajuzepaul@gmail.com.
Paul