When Jesutomiwa Salam says he builds things that make other things work, he is simply summarising a journey that began more than a decade ago.
Today, Salam is an Engineering Lead who builds artificial intelligence systems used by insurers across Africa and the Middle East. But his story starts from a place of uncertainty, something many Nigerian tech talents will recognise.
“When I finished secondary school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The only thing I knew was that I loved mathematics and physics, but I did not like the practical aspects of them. I didn’t like having to connect wires or build systems or integrations,” he tells Techpoint Africa.
Yet somehow, he found his way to solving complex problems.
In his search for a path, Salam realised, from watching movies, that characters who were good at maths always wrote code, so he decided to try his hand at coding.
He enrolled in a web development class for a short while and later taught himself to code through books and online videos.
This is a learning pattern that mirrors the journey of many early Nigerian tech talents. Sometimes they start with a brief class at a semi-formal computer school and then spend months, sometimes years, piecing knowledge together from blogs, GitHub, YouTube, and trial-and-error.
But the landscape is shifting. Remote tech schools like AltSchool are beginning to formalise what used to be a largely self-driven path, giving today’s beginners a more structured starting point than was obtainable years ago.
Solving vague, impactful problems
After completing a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Salam went on to acquire a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Surrey, UK.
He says he made a decision early in his career that has significantly shaped his trajectory.
“A decision I made early on in my career was that I was going to look for places where I could solve problems that were very vague, not so structured, not so defined, but if solved, could bring about real impact.”
This philosophy has guided every key move. Starting with the HNG Internship with Hotels.ng, where, in a team of five, he built a platform that helped African software engineers find and apply to remote jobs.
His leadership potential emerged early. After the internship, he was one of three people offered the opportunity to stay on and lead the product growth effort.
He spent four months at the organisation, working on the product and building tools for new interns.
“One key thing I learned from that experience is that I have a natural tendency to lead projects because I tried as much as possible to do the hard things early on.”
It wasn’t long before bigger challenges came calling.
Next, Salam joined Patricia, a crypto payments company. He arrived at a pivotal time, just as the startup was moving into B2B services.
He recalls that this was his initial introduction to blockchain, and that he realised not many people were working on B2B blockchain projects, which intrigued him.
One of the most significant issues he set out to solve at Patricia was cryptocurrency volatility.
A business might receive crypto payments at one exchange rate, only for the rate to swing wildly minutes later. Companies needed instant settlements that were not subject to this volatility.
Salam built a payment processing engine that integrated payment providers in East and West Africa to allow instant payment settlements for businesses at stable exchange rates.
“At the time I built this, it didn’t seem like a scalable solution. But it’s very interesting to see now that it’s the same solution that most companies that try to do this now adopt.”
This crypto volatility challenge was not unique to Patricia. At the height of crypto adoption in Nigeria, startups across the ecosystem were racing to build stabilisation mechanisms. Still, few had the engineering depth or payment infrastructure to make it work reliably.
Salam’s solution landed at a moment when businesses desperately needed predictability.
After six months in a software engineering role, Salam was promoted to Engineering Lead at Patricia, where he led the team for over two years.
But his vision to focus on vaguely defined, potentially impactful problems led him to search for other projects. This search led him to the field of artificial intelligence.
Salam joined Curacel, a software company developing AI tools for insurance companies, as a Senior Software Engineer in 2023, following his exit from Patricia. His growth at Curacel was fast, as he was promoted to Engineering L
ead within one year of joining the company.
“I lead a team of 13 engineers building AI for the biggest insurers in East Africa and the Middle East.”
He currently builds AI tools to help insurers process claims in seconds.
One of his most impactful contributions at Curacel is the Curacel Pay payment system.
He explains that at the time he joined the company, payments between insurers and medical facilities were offline and manual, leading to payment delays or discrepancies.
So, although everyone else saw this process as the status quo, Salam thought it could be better and set out to fix it.
Coming from a financial background at Patricia, he built a payment system for insurers to make payments to healthcare facilities and for these facilities to track their payments.
“I initially built that as a payment service, but when users started using the feature, it became necessary to turn that small service into a product of its own that insurers could use to do more things.”
Salam also redesigned the entire claims validation process at Curacel.
He explains that the existing insurance claims pipeline, while effective initially, was not fully aligned with the organisation’s current scale and future growth plans.
He built a pipeline architecture to break down the claims process into visible, flexible stages. This enabled administrators and insurers to see where a claim passed or failed.
Within Africa’s insurance sector, lack of transparency has been one of the biggest obstacles to efficiency. Claims often get stuck in processes where neither hospitals nor insurers can identify the point of failure. By introducing visibility into the pipeline, Salam’s work reflects a broader industry shift toward transparency.
The differentiating factor
Salam’s impact across companies reveals a pattern of gravitating towards problems that others shy away from.
He says a key skill that has always differentiated him is a keen attention to detail. This is evident in his growth trajectory from leading teams at HNG after just a few months in, to becoming Engineering Lead at Patricia and Curacel.
“Most people who have really moved the needle in technology globally started with going at problems that people did not see as problems at the time, or problems that people saw as problems but did not believe that they had clear solutions to them.
“If I decided to start my career going after easy problems, then I do not think I would have gained the kind of leverage I have over the years.”
Vision for AI and the systems of tomorrow
Looking back at Salam’s journey, what stands out isn’t just the range of problems he has solved but the way he has moved through each phase with curiosity and refused to ignore difficult work.
From stumbling into code to building systems used across regions, his path shows how impact often comes from people who stay open to reinvention.
And if his story reveals anything about the ecosystem, it’s that progress here is still driven by people who are willing to build even when the path isn’t clearly marked.
As he continues on this path, he envisions going after more complex problems in artificial intelligence. He shares that he wants to build the architecture to integrate AI into old legacy systems.
“It’s why one of the initiatives that I recently started is an AI research lab focused on redefining quality in the age of AI.”
