Timilehin Ayantunji fell in love with technology in secondary school. Although it had not been his goal, and he could never have imagined a career as a Frontend Engineer, his love for mathematics and attraction to numbers, logic, and problem-solving were the earliest signs of the path he would eventually take.
Growing up in a modest household, numbers felt natural to him long before he understood how they might be helpful in a career. His earliest interaction with computers came through a family laptop bought for his elder sister when she was admitted to university. During her holidays, he would quietly use it to play typing games like Mavis Beacon, gradually becoming comfortable with keyboards and digital interfaces.
“I didn’t come from a computer science background, but I saw technology as a natural extension of the analytical thinking I had and enjoyed,” Ayantunji tells Techpoint Africa.
But his tech career only started after university. Following a university degree in Fisheries from the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), he was accepted into an internship at a health-tech startup, MyMedicalBank, where he got the opportunity to learn quickly.
His first exposure to software development had come earlier through a short-lived internship. With no understanding of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, he struggled to keep up in the fast-paced environment and was eventually let go. Rather than discourage him, the experience spurred him to seek more knowledge.
“I relied heavily on free resources. I spent countless hours on YouTube, particularly learning from Brad Traversy’s tutorials, slowly understanding frontend development fundamentals.”
So, when he eventually got an internship at MyMedicalBank, he was more prepared to excel.
Ayantunji recalls that the internship coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a pressing need for technological innovations that could quickly and effectively connect people with healthcare workers.
He contributed to building telemedicine features that could bridge that gap, including HomeCare and Clinic Visits on the company’s web application.
At the time, hospital visits were increasingly complex, and there was a need to support remote healthcare access. Ayantunji worked closely with his manager to lead a team of interns who delivered key telemedicine features under intense time pressure.
His crucial role on the team and mentorship from his superiors laid the foundation for his eventual transition to frontend engineering.
For many early-career engineers, the pandemic marked a turning point. It accelerated online learning and opened up remote roles to talent in the global south who had previously been excluded from global hiring pipelines.
But few entered the industry directly into crisis-driven products. The fact that Ayantunji’s first engineering tasks were tied to nationwide healthcare strain meant he learned under conditions where reliability was crucial.
It prompted him to build urgent, impactful tools early on, rather than spending long periods on theoretical projects that many online learners often encounter due to limited opportunities.
A frontend engineering journey
After his internship at MyMedicalBank, Ayantunji took another internship at Venture Garden Group, a venture capital firm. Here, he was named the best graduating intern and offered a Junior Frontend Engineer role in one of the group’s strategic business units focused on education technology.
“I worked on an app for student loans, and we got many applications while I was there. The process was not digitized initially, but when I got there, there was a need for the app to have students get a loan and then disburse it after going through the necessary vetting.”
He developed the Educollect loan application system, which led to a 30% increase in successful student loan applications.
Ayantunji also built websites for innovative edtech companies such as Vigilearn, New Edutech, and Bursery.
The role marked his first exposure to structured engineering processes, including Scrum, sprint planning, daily standups, project management, product ownership, and senior backend engineering. He initially struggled with communication, often feeling out of depth and working late into the night to show progress at standup meetings the next morning.
“Those moments were mentally draining, but they shaped how I approach engineering today.”
His next challenge was a frontend engineering role at Polaris Bank, where he worked on the VULTe Digital Bank.
“I built a guest bill payment feature for users without bank accounts to pay their bills without owning a bank account with Polaris. It was a direct contribution to financial inclusion.”
The feature enabled users, including those without a Polaris Bank account, to conduct transactions such as subscriptions, electricity bill payments, and other essential services.
Ayantunji says that a key challenge during the project was balancing security, regulatory compliance, and ease of use for unregistered users. Solving this required careful architectural decisions and extensive testing, and this feature ultimately boosted customer engagement by 20% and increased the company’s revenue by 10%.
The guest bill-payment feature he built for Polaris points to a strategic shift in how traditional banks are trying to catch up to fintechs. Instead of insisting on complete customer onboarding before service access, banks are increasingly offering low-commitment entry points to capture the informal and semi-banked population by creating digital banks that operate separately from the parent institutions.
This approach often helps banks tap new user segments. But more importantly, it highlights broader financial inclusion trends in Nigeria, where users prefer utility-first interactions over traditional account ownership. It also raises a crucial question for the industry: has conventional banking struggled to increase Nigeria’s banked population, not because demand is low, but because rigid onboarding processes have kept willing users out?
With the experience at Polaris Bank under his belt, the next step in Timilehin’s journey felt almost inevitable. At Future Africa, he stepped into a Senior Frontend Engineer position, contributing to the organisation’s 2023 Accelerate Africa cohort.
Ayantunji developed the Accelerate Africa web app, which facilitated millions in funding for participating startups.
The platform supported the accelerator’s full lifecycle, from startup applications and evaluations to progress tracking for founders across the cohort, some of whom eventually secured funding.
Until recently, he led the frontend team at eTranzact, where he was at the forefront of what users see and interact with. His work led to the development of PocketMoni, a mobile money solution that enables users to access financial services from their phones.
“I built features like seamless agent onboarding and the smart commissioning system that a lot of agents across Nigeria now use.”
In this role, he led the team responsible for onboarding over 10,000 agents in Nigeria.
A major challenge in building PocketMoni was translating complex financial logic into simple, reliable user experiences for non-technical users, which required multiple iterations and close collaboration with backend engineers and product stakeholders.
He adds that the commission feature built into PocketMoni, infused with artificial intelligence, is one of the projects he is most proud of.
Beyond fintech, Ayantunji has worked on public sector and enterprise platforms. He contributed to building a digital licensing platform for the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA), replacing a previously manual process with a structured system that supported applications, internal reviews, site inspections, and approvals.
“Working on a government system introduced a different level of responsibility, particularly around data integrity, auditability, and long-term maintainability.”
He also served as Frontend Lead on Billa, a self-service onboarding platform for merchants, where he helped architect the web application, mentored engineers, collaborated with product teams, and made architectural decisions designed to support long-term scale.
The vision for the future
Technology evolves fast, and that constant evolution is a challenge Ayantunji has learned to embrace rather than fear.
He recalls that throughout his career, strong mentorship and community have been crucial to his development and keeping him abreast of the constant changes in the industry.
Now, he wants to do the same for beginners on their tech career paths by providing mentorship that supports them.
“I want people to have better access to technology, opportunities, and knowledge because these are the things that shaped me — mentoring and community.”
Outside his formal roles, he serves as the tech lead for Newbii and mentors developers through platforms such as ADPlist and InternPulse, as well as through training institutions such as ITSkills Centre. In 2024, he was recognised as one of ADPlist’s top mentors in Africa, while InternPulse featured him among Nigeria’s top software engineers.
As a Frontend Engineer, he remains committed to ensuring that users achieve the best results when interacting with products.
Ayantunji’s path, as inspiring as it is, is not unusual in Nigeria, where many people often transition into tech careers from unrelated fields. For instance, serial entrepreneur and founder of Flutterwave, Andela, and Future Africa, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji studied Legal and International Studies before co-founding two of Africa’s unicorns.
Hence, Ayantunji’s experience portrays that a tech-related degree is not the most important factor in technological problem-solving. More important is the need for mentorship, training, and organisations willing to take a chance on young tech-inclined people with a passion for learning and problem-solving, regardless of their educational background.
